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A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE 




THK SPIRIT OF ROME 



A ROMAN 
PILGRIMAGE 

BY 

R. ELLIS ROBERTS 



WITH SIXTEEN ILLUSTRATIONS IN COLOUR BY 

WILLIAM PASCOE 

AND EIGHT OTHER ILLUSTRATIONS 



NEW YORK 
FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY 

PUBLISHERS 



TO 

DOMINIC 



CONTENTS 



CHAPTER 

I. All Roads lead to Rome 
11. St Peter and his Basilica: Michael Angelo 

III. Rome Pagan: Roman Art 

IV. Rome underground 
V. Rome at Church . . • • 

VI. Outside Rome : The Campagna . 
VII. The Road to Genzano . 
VIII. Art and Artists . . . • 

IX. Three Roman Functions 
X. The Lateran and S. Maria Maggiore 
XI. Two Roman Martyrs 
XII. A Sorcerer and a Saint 

XIII. Raphael : Pinturicchio : Michael Angelo 

XIV. The Holy Father 
Index ..•••• 



PAGE 

I 

12 

35 
68 
89 
122 
136 
156 
176 
192 
211 
228 

245 
265 

271 



vu 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 



IN COLOUR 
The Spirit of Rome 

S. Peter's . 

In the Forum 

The Colosseum at Night 

The Castle of S. Angelo 

From the Doors of S. Peter's 

The Pantheon 

San Clemente 

The Temple of Vesta . 

Tomb of C/ecilia Metella 

Italian Soldier . 

The Fruit of the Campagna 

Italian Peasant Woman. 

Piazza Barberini. 

Piazza di Spagna . 

View from the Pincian . 



Frontispiece 

FACING PAGE 



/ 



14^ 

40 •/ 

44/ 

54 

76, 
io8\ 
114. 
134/ 
140V 
I44v/ 
152/ 
210 
248 
265 



IX 



A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE 

IN MONOTONE 



KACING TAGE 



PiETA. From the marble group by Michael Angelo 

in San Pietro in Vaticano . . 22 ^J 

{Photograph by Anderson) 

The Prophet Jonah. From the fresco by Michael 

Angelo in the Sistine Chapel, the Vatican . 28 / 

{Photograph by Anderson) 

Antinous. From the statue in the Vatican . . 62 

{Photograph by Anderson) 

Marcus Aurelius. From the equestrian statue in the 

Capitol . . . . .66 

{Photograph by Anderson) 

Sacred and Profane Love. From the painting by Titian 

in the Borghese Gallery . . .160/ 

{Photograph by Anderson) 

S. C/ECILIa. From the statue by Maderna in the Chapel 

of S. Caecilia . . . . .224 

{Photograph by Anderson) 

Alexander VI. From the fresco by Pinturicchio in the 

Borgia Rooms, the Vatican . . . 258 

{Photograph by Anderson) 

MosES. From the statue by Michael Angelo in San 

Pietro di Vincoli . . .262 

{Photograph by Alinari) 



A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE 



A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE 



CHAPTER I 

ALL ROADS LEAD TO ROME 

THE popular proverb was always a puzzle to me as a 
child. I remember reading a book called " It's a 
long Lane that has no Turning " — and could not be per- 
suaded by my elders as to the real significance of the 
title. I looked for that lane on my country walks. I 
questioned more experienced travellers about it. I 
wondered whether it was along that uncornered lane that 
pursuers of rainbow gold were forced to go. I pictured it 
as running, like a swift and secret arrow, beside one of 
those interminable Rues Nationales of France ; gleaming 
through golden cornfields and flashing through the dark 
green villages of Normandy. And I could not contain 
my disappointment when I learnt that the proverb was 
intended to be, not mystical, but full of common-sense ; 
not redolent of positive joy, but merely the vehicle of a 
rather rustic optimism. Or again that companion 
apophthegm, " It's an ill wind that blows nobody any 
good," was always for me the picture of some not normal 
hurricane, some Euroclydon of the universe which blasted 
and bruised town and hamlet, city and country, cattle 
and men. 

And ** All roads lead to Rome " — I protest to this day 
I do not know what the proverb means. Most people, I 
find, particularly if they use the proverb ecclesiastically 



2 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE 

or imperially, intend to express a conviction that Rome is 
the universal goal, the sublime and continuing harbour of 
all our shiftless endeavours and futile ambition. Rome, 
for them, like the Boyg in Peer Gynt, wins all through 
gentleness ; fights by refusing to fight, is victorious after 
the monstrous fashion of the East, by allowing her 
opponents to exhaust themselves and to fail. She is the 
sea to which all rivers run ; she is the great ocean of human 
hope, and fidelity, and folly, and ambition and zeal. 

Well, I will have none of that. That is not, to my 
mind, a true picture of the city of Caesar and Peter, of 
Brutus and Borgia : so calm and inhuman a mistress 
would never have won the allegiance of so many periods 
and religions and temperaments. Rome has the allure of 
the mountains, the charm of the hills on which she sits, 
and with which she is girdled : her secret is not some- 
thing which swallows up the adorer, it is no Nirvana of 
the spirit or the mind ; her secret is a jewel for which her 
admirers must joust, and to whom she will she gives it. 
" All roads lead to Rome " : yes, but you must get on to a 
road. And the idler, the false mystic, the Buddhist, the 
quiet ist adventures no high road : he lingers, in a keen 
selfishness, among the meadows of a false philosophy. 
*' All roads lead to Rome " : yes, but you must have the 
will to move, the passion to achieve, the desire to possess. 
" All roads lead to Rome " : yes, whether as Christian, or 
as poet, or as archaeologist, or as aesthete you may go 
to Rome and you will then reach the treasure of the ages 
of the heart, the satisfaction of many needs, the solace of 
sorrow and the deep security of faith. 

" What road shall we choose ? " That was the first 
question that Dominic and I asked each other. We had 
settled to go to Rome ; and we found we could manage a 
full twenty- two days there, if we broke our journey at 
Genoa on the way down, and possibly at Pisa and Paris 
on our return. Twenty-two days at Rome ! There were 



ALL ROADS LEAD TO ROME 3 

once three Americans who were presented to Pio Nono. 
The first said he was staying six months at Rome. ** You 
will see something," replied his Holiness. The second 
had to leave after three months. ** You will see a good 
deal," was the papal encouragement. The third confessed 
that he could only spare three weeks in the Holy City. 
*' Ah ! " retorted Pius, " you will see everything." It is 
a consoling story, with a good deal of truth in it ; but 
Dominic thought it would be a little rash to rely upon it 
as an absolute guide. Dominic is always more ready than 
I to plan a tour ; and he always plans it well : so I acceded 
to his request that we should definitely, before we left 
England, decide what road we should take to Rome. It 
did not take long to decide. Great as is the interest of 
Rome pagan, the Rome of Caesar, and Horace, and Catullus, 
and Juvenal, it must yield for Christians and Catholics to 
the Rome of the Catacombs, to the Rome of the martyrs, 
the Rome of Peter and Paul, of Gregory and Francesca, 
to the Rome where Fra Angelico and Michael Angelo meet, 
the Rome which Pinturicchio and Raphael and Botticelli 
decorated. After all, even the great monuments of 
Imperial Rome achieve half their interest by virtue of 
their Christian associations ; the Colosseum is wonderful 
not because of its arrogant size and insolent swing, but 
because here the unnamed martyrs of the Church shed 
their seminal blood. The playthings of paganism are the 
religion of Christian Europe ; and of the religion of Im- 
perial Rome modern Europe has, at different times, made 
a toy for her courts and her theatres. 

So, without quite so many words perhaps, Dominic 
decided that our first business in Rome should be to visit 
shrines and churches, and to see Christian and Renascence 
art ; and to settle, when there, how much time we could 
afford to such things as the Forum and the Palatine, the 
Baths of Diocletian and the Museum of the Capitol and 
the Conservatori. Unlike most people who are methodical 



4 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE 

and good at plan-making, Dominic does not mind departing 
from arrangements ; and, as it happened, we saw a good 
deal of Republican and Caesarean Rome, and saw it, too, 
in spite of some difficulties, with more considered ease 
than I had expected. 

We had chosen for the time of our pilgrimage — for it 
remained, I insist, more of a pilgrimage than a tour, 
though Dominic always complained that we ate too well 
and did not hear Mass often enough for real pilgrims. I 
pointed out to him that all mediaeval pilgrims fared 
as well as they could ; and that even in the year of 
Jubilee comfort was not thought inconsistent with piety ; 
but he only retorted that the feebleness of others was no 
excuse for our own luxury, and that he at any rate did not 
feel at all like a pilgrim. Well, as I was saying, we chose 
Christmastide and Epiphanytide for our pilgrimage (the 
word shall stand) ; it is, from the ecclesiastical point of 
view, a season at Rome even more entrancing than Easter 
— for nothing at Easter equals in excitement the Epiphany 
week at S. Andrea della Valle. It is a time when the 
climate should be kind ; and when Rome is not intolerably 
full of English and American tourists. (Why are all — or 
nearly all — visitors to foreign places '* tourists," except 
one's own immediate circle ?) 

So we left England on the day of S. John the Evangelist, 
making up our minds not to rush through but to stay a 
night at Genoa and arrive at Rome not too travel-weary 
to appreciate even a night-glimpse at her beauty. This 
intention, however, was frustrated by the Italian railways. 
Between Vada and Cecina runs a river, and over that river 
a bridge which the express from Genoa to Rome crosses. 
In the winter of our pilgrimage the bridge was broken : 
and all the travellers were bundled out of the train, and 
packed away with their luggage into bullock waggons. 
For a mile or so we were driven until we reached Cecina, 
and then we had to enter a train that had been a de luxe 



ALL ROADS LEAD TO ROME 5 

somewhere about the year 1880 — the compartments were 
upholstered in red plush, the train was innocent of any 
corridor and noxious with many draughts ; smashed 
windows and a general fustiness of disuse completed the 
discomfort. I am sure no mediaeval pilgrim, with the 
good road under his own, or his horse's, feet suffered half 
our anguish in the miserable end of the journey : so, 
rather cold and cross and hungry, Dominic and I gazed 
through the steaming glass of a hotel omnibus on the 
dark and clattering streets of the Eternal City. 

Most old towns are spoiled by the extension of suburbia. 
It is a condition peculiar, I think, to modern civilization. 
People who have not the means to live in the old cities, 
or the initiative to live in the country — for of course 
to-day it requires far more originality to stay in the country 
than to leave it — linger on the outskirts of great towns. 
This is not quite fair to all suburban dwellers. Round 
about London, for instance, many suburbs are merely 
the exaggeration of old villages — and Islington, Fulham, 
or Chelsea enshrine — in how doleful a casket ! — memories 
of old-world, country hamlets. There is a real difference 
between the suburb which has had its centre in a village, 
however insignificant, and the suburb which, spreading out 
from the main town, has swallowed up, unrelenting and 
unheeding, all landmarks of ancient reality. Now Rome 
is free from both kinds of suburbs : freer even than Oxford, 
freer than any great town, and as free as the small walled 
cities, like Rothenburg on the Tauber. There are plenty 
of great villas outside Rome, plenty of convents and 
villages — but unless one so far miscalls the Vatican, there 
are no suburbs. No doubt the Campagna, with its sweep 
of uninhabited land, its ghosts of Etruscan cities, and its 
thousands of desolate tombs, helped very largely in keeping 
Rome free from suburbs ; certainly the result is that 
Rome, viewed from quite close, has an aspect that cannot 
be equalled by any other city. 



6 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE 

Almost at the beginning of our stay Dominic and I were 
taken by a friend up to the garden of the Doria Pamphili 
Palace. There, without straining the eyes, you can see 
the whole stretch of the Queen of the Seven Hills — see 
easily right over Trastevere, with its homely quarters and 
popular churches, across to the Aventine with its memories 
of the Apostles, to the Celian where S. Stephen guards 
the tragedy of the saints in his round church, and the 
Sisters of the Maternal Heart of Mary care for the sick 
among their flowers and trees ; or away in the north-east 
where the line of the Road of September leaves the Quirinal 
on its way to the Porta Pia ; or right over the heart of 
Rome, where the Capitol is crowned by Ara Coeli, to the 
fine Gate of the People at the end of the Via Babuino. So 
seen, Rome gives a sense of completeness, of unity that no 
other great city has ever inspired in me. Dominic, faith- 
ful to the Isis, put in a plea for Oxford : and certainly 
Oxford in the " Fifties " must have given somewhat of 
the same impression. Although even then without her 
walls, Magdalen College and Folly Bridge and the sweep 
of S. Giles guarded and ringed her : but in Oxford to-day 
you pass too easily into that new creation that has linked 
Summertown with Hinksey, joined the Dew-Drop and the 
Mitre, and confounds in one town S. Edward's College 
and the choir-schools of Wolsey's and Wykeham's founda- 
tions. In Rome you have plenty that is new ; but none 
of it — not even the regal memorial that swaggers and 
browbeats the old streets — can remain unabsorbed. The 
secret of Rome is that — everything, however distinctive, 
however definite, that comes to Rome is certain to take on 
as well that indefinable something which we call " Roman" ; 
a quality that you may worship or condemn, but which 
cannot be ignored. " Do in Rome as Rome does " is not 
a bit of advice ; it is a warning, nay, almost a prophecy. 
The lovers of the Eternal City know her strength : she 
does not crush or distort originality — did not Michael 



ALL ROADS LEAD TO ROME 7 

Angelo do his greatest for her ? — but all must be done in 
her service. She is as intolerant as Christianity itself ; if 
you join her at all you must be hers heart and soul, body 
and mind : but then, as in Christianity, you will find that 
never before have your powers been so much and so truly 
your own. 

While we were in Rome Dominic and I exchanged 
impressions both of details and of the whole, at least every 
day ; and towards the end we agreed that the four 
epithets that described her best were : compact, coherent, 
continuous and converted. 

The compactness is, of course, due to the lack of suburbs; 
and it is, I suppose, one of the reasons that make all of us 
feel we can understand Rome very easily. People talk 
lightly about the clarity of the Latin genius ; they com- 
pare the mysterious and obscure solemnity of the Holy 
Sacrifice as offered in S. Athanasius of the Greeks with the 
simple and straightforward Mass of San Pietro in Vaticano 
or Santa Maria sopra Minerva ; they contrast the dim 
wonder of Gothic and Byzantine, with the public flaunting 
openness of the Roman basilica. There is truth in this. 
But not so easily does a great city, a great people, or a 
great religion yield its secrets. There is a subtlety that 
disregards disguise ; a mystery so sure of itself that it 
disdains wrappings, a privacy so awful that it cares not 
how public is its expression. I yield to none in my love 
for the Greek and the Eastern, or for the Gothic ; but I 
am not sure that there is not more of the spirit of Chris- 
tianity in this naked grandeur of the Latins, this nervous, 
proud insistence on the bare elements of religions, the 
essential heart of truth. And it is significant, is it not, 
that all the greatest mystics have been Latins by religion ? 
In the East the true mystic, the man who has passed 
through the obscure Night to the Great Vision, is rare, 
although no doubt the ordinary worshipper has a higher 
sense of the mystery of his religion than has the servant of 



8 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE 

the Catholic Church in the West. Anyway, beware of 
thinking you can swiftly pluck the heart out of Rome. 
The two things for which she stands — the law of Caesar 
and the law of Christ — are easily obeyed : but compre- 
hended ? 

Rome, too, is coherent. You might easily put within 
four walls a collection of houses and churches that might 
be compact enough, and yet produce no result save a 
sentiment of muddle and compression. Rome avoids 
that — avoids it, if you will, by a miracle, but still avoids 
it. I know I run counter to all sentiment in this matter. 
Every new change, since the days of the first Prisoner of 
the Vatican, has been hailed by such lovers of Rome as 
Mr Augustus Hare as little short of blasphemy and 
little better than destruction. From the coinage to the 
Colosseum, from the trams to the statue of Garibaldi, from 
the cleaned Forum to the crowded Corso, all the changes 
are cursed as spoiling the city. This flood of invective 
shows but little faith in the Capital of the West. Rome 
will survive the vulgarities — for there are some vulgarities 
— of the present regime, just as she survived the vulgari- 
ties of the seventeenth century, or the earlier, the incom- 
parable insolence of Nero. I protest that we, who went 
with no feeling of sympathy with the modem government 
of Signer Nathan, could find little to complain of. The 
monument to Vittore Emmanuele will be hideous, but 
the city that saw the golden image of Nero, the vacant 
swagger of the Colosseum, and the knobbly vitality of 
Bernini, need not fear one more triumph of the Philistines. 
After all, the Goths entered Rome a long while ago : and 
Rome still stands, while the Goths — who will claim the 
title ? 

The continuity of Rome is more amazing, possibly, than 
any of her other characteristics. How easily the Pantheon 
becomes a Christian church : how naturally does one pass, 
in that wonderful Church of San Clemente, from the first 



ALL ROADS LEAD TO ROME 9 

building with its image of Mithras to the second with its 
frescoes still redolent of the ninth century, and to the 
third, which links our own time with the glory of the Middle 
Ages. There is nothing that Rome has wasted, nothing 
that Rome has destroyed. She transforms. There is an 
exception to this. When we have mentioned the beautiful 
Church of Our Lady over Minerva, with its wonderful 
tomb of that quaint writer, Durandus, we have finished 
with the Gothic in Rome. And even there the Gothic is 
subdued. Any other must be sought in the Sacre Grotte, 
or in a few odd corners, where one may see some carved 
Paschal candlestick or the broken remnants of a tomb 
or a tabernacle or a statue. And this absence of Gothic 
helps the feeling of continuity. One never thinks of Rome 
as having had a Gothic period ; and so one glides from 
the Rome of Romulus to the Rome of the Gracchi, and 
from the Gracchi to Cataline and Caesar and Cicero, and 
from Caesar to Marcus Aurelius and Julian, and from 
Julian to Gregory, and so through Christian history until 
we arrive at Pio Decimo and — shall we say the Convent 
of San Anselmo on the Aventine ? 

And converted — this is the most noticeable, the most 
proclaimed of all Roman characteristics. It is true that 
modern folly- — and this we did curse — has removed the 
chapels from the Colosseum ; but still on the pillars of 
the Caesars is displayed the cross of Christ. Still where 
stood a temple of Mater Matuta the modern Roman may 
worship in honour of S. Maria Egiziaca. Still from the 
Capitol of ancient Rome the Bambino blesses the city at 
the time of the showing to the Gentiles. 

Here Rome has but followed the course of Christianity 
throughout the world. While the religion of the Gospel is 
the most exclusive, it is almost the most inclusive ; most 
intolerant to those who reject, most genial to those who 
obey. The wise men of Alexandria brought to the 
service of Christian theology Greek philosophy and Greek 



10 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE 

mysticism ; the men of the West brought popular devotion 
and popular superstition to the same service. There were 
dangers in both processes — all movement is dangerous — 
no doubt a few men transferred to Mary, Stella Maris, an 
allegiance given ages since to a sea-born goddess, and 
transferred it with little thought : and no doubt some men 
who were slaves to the pride of intellect in Greece, were 
slaves also under the banner of the Cross. But the gain 
surely outweighs all possible evil. At the time when 
Peter and Paul brought the Gospel to Rome, the larger 
part of the Latin race definitely worshipped beings whose 
attributes were admittedly evil ; Latin religion was not 
divorced from conduct, it was wedded to evil conduct. 
To-day, God knows, one may find men whose lives are 
evil, while they still have devout professions ; but overt 
worship of evil is not possible to anyone who retains an 
iota of the Christianity of his fathers. This at least 
popular Catholicism, with its shrines and its saints, its 
crucifix and its confessors, did eminently accomplish : it 
pulled down everywhere the altars erected to lust, to 
cruelty, to pride, to vainglory, and substituted shrines to 
mercy, pity, peace. It put in the highest heavens the 
bruised image of a condemned God ; it flamed across the 
arch of the world the message that victory is gained only 
by self-sacrifice. The temple of Aphrodite with her sterile 
lusts, and her painted, twitching servitors, fell, and for 
the first time the Woman with the Child is enthroned in 
the heavens. A Catholic tradition is the foundation oi all 
modern civilization. For all modern civilization is dis- 
tinctive only by virtue of the place given to woman ; and 
the place given to woman was secured to Christian nations 
when they saw Mary assumed into heaven. 

*' Mortals, who behold a Woman 
Rising 'iwixt the moon and sun. 
Who am I the heavens assume ? An 
All am /, and I am one. 



ALL ROADS LEAD TO ROME ii 

Multitudinous ascend I, 

Mighty as a battle arrayed : 
And I bear you whither tend I ; 

Ye are I : be undismayed. 
I, the ark that for the graven 

Tablets of the Law was made ; 
Heart of Man was one, one Heaven ; 

Both within my Womb were laid.'^ 

I have said that Rome is continuous. And of its 
appearance the statement is true. But she underwent 
a great change of heart ; she who was the Great Harlot of 
the Apocalypse became the Holy City, when she turned 
from the old gods of her people, and from the borrowed 
gods of Greece and the East to the figure of the Mother 
and the Babe. Rome is the converted city. 



CHAPTER II 

S. PETER AND HIS BASILICA 

ABOUT A.D. 55 Simon Peter arrived in Rome. 
Nine years later the Imperial authorities were 
seriously disturbed at the growth and secrecy of that 
curious sect of the Jews, who worshipped Christus, and 
were called Christians or Nazarenes. They were evi- 
dently, to a Roman mind, indeed to any reasonable man 
who desired to preserve authority and society, a most 
mischievous and decadent sect. Rome, as Juvenal 
thundered, was the cesspool for all the grossest Oriental 
superstitions. The unclean and unnatural devotions 
of the East, the slack immorality of a sleek religion, were 
sapping the old Roman ideals of order, of good govern- 
ment, of justice, of Res Publica — these Christians actually 
put in the place of a god one whose claim to deity rested 
on rebellion, on defiance, and on anarchism. Men who 
had examined this superstition asserted that the behaviour 
of this Christus before the judge was insolent ; that he had 
refused to plead, and when pressed had claimed to be 
Son of God. And this claim the authorities very properly 
met by his prompt execution. Even the Jews — except 
a few of his family and intimates — despised and ridiculed 
him ; and the horrible religion had originally only spread 
in such centres of vice as Corinth, or such homes of 
ignorance as Galatia. In Rome its adherents were slaves 
and freedmen, prostitutes and pandars, v/ith a small 
sprinkling of better-class men who, in the general break-up 
of national morality, were feverishly eager to try any new 

12 



S. PETER AND HIS BASILICA 13 

remedy for the world's ancient burden of weariness. In 
64 the authorities decided to make a decisive move against 
Christianity. Nero, with that sound statesmanship that 
marks Imperial from Republican Rome, determined to 
mingle punishment with popular amusement. He gave 
a great entertainment in the gardens that covered the 
Vatican hill, the Campi Vaticani, where Cincinnatus had 
held a farm, and where Apollo had his temple. Under 
the auspices of the calm, sane, beautiful Sun-God, Nero 
prepared to stamp out Christianity. Rome had recently 
suffered from a severe conflagration, and there was little 
doubt in the minds of the police that the fire had originated 
with the Christians, probably in a bold attempt to destroy 
the city and, during the destruction, to effect some kind of 
revolution. This was fortunately prevented, through 
some miscarriage of their plans, and while enough 
Christians remained for a suitable execution there was no 
fear of their overcoming the law-abiding citizens. Nero 
himself gave some thought to the nature of the punish- 
ments, which are recorded in detail by Tacitus, and he 
succeeded in achieving a grim suitability to the crime 
of which the Christians were guilty. Many of these vaga- 
bonds were smeared with pitch and set light to ; so that 
their burning bodies glowed across the evening sky, as on 
the slopes of the gardens the people of Rome enjoyed 
their Emperor's munificence and admired his justice. 

Two years later, by the execution of the leaders of the 
sect in Rome, Petrus and Paulus, the Imperial policy was 
brought to a successful conclusion. 

Peter, I think, can never have been very happy at 
Rome. He had not Paul's interest in Greek thought and 
Roman civilization. The Galilean Fisherman, strong of 
character, obstinate, resourceful, was bewildered by the 
clamour of the city he calls Babylon. In that first letter 
of his, written from who knows what little room in the 
Jews' quarters in Trastevere, he insists on the " electness," 



14 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE 

the peculiarity of his faith, and his flock. " Ye are a 
chosen generation, a royal priesthood, an holy nation, a 
peculiar people ; that ye should show forth the praises 
of him who hath called you out of darkness into his 
marvellous light " — that was the belief which kept Peter 
during the Neronian persecution, that the vision which 
turned his feet back, when he had fled along the Appian 
Way, that the resource against which all the devices of all 
the Caesars were powerless to succeed. 

And because of Peter's faith, because of the strength 
and abidingness of the Rock, Dominic and I went, on our 
first morning in Rome, straight to the Basilica of San 
Pietro in Vaticano, over the ground where, centuries ago, 
our fellow-Christians had flared their faith in the gardens 
of the Beast of the Apocalypse, up to the great Confessio 
where the ninety- three lamps guide our footsteps ad limina 
Apostolorum. This is the real end of the Imperial policy — 
of Nero, of Aurelius, of Julian : the Basilica, built on 
the ruins of the old church, magnified by the genius of 
Buonarroti, is nothing more and nothing less than a 
gigantic tomb for the body of the Hebrew Fisherman, 
whom his Lord called the Rock. Not only is Peter's 
character the foundation of the Christian Church, but 
Peter's relics are the foundation of the cathedral of 
Christendom. Though S. John may command more 
love, and S. Paul a greater admiration, the whole plebs 
of the Christian world finds its true expression at the 
Confessio of S. Peter : for S. Peter represents more 
essentially than any other of the Apostles the one thing 
needful for the Christian disciple — the conversion of 
character. Without that, the love of a S. John, the 
intellect of a S. Paul, the tact of S. Barnabas would be 
useless : and character was Peter's only gift, as it must 
still be the only gift of countless millions of Christians ; 
as it was indeed the only gift of the innumerable army 
who were slain, and burnt, and tortured and defiled on the 




ST. PETER'S 



S. PETER AND HIS BASILICA 15 

ground which is now embraced by the sweep of the great 
colonnade. 

Thoughts such as these sprang into my mind as I knelt, 
with other pilgrims, and gazed down into the Confessio, 
or looked up where Christ's promise is blazoned round 
the dome. '* Tu es Petrus et super banc Petram aedi- 
ficabo Ecclesiam meam." Peter is the typical Christian, 
the auto-Christian ; and the Church that forsakes Peter 
can never be sure of Christ ; no amount of learning, no 
amount of zeal, neither high ambition, nor supreme 
humility, neither culture nor simplicity will avail without 
that changed character, that turned temperament that is 
the keystone of the Christian life. 

And the long army of saints who crossed the sea and 
wandered over weary leagues of land to come to the Con- 
fessio bear witness to this. To kneel where had knelt 
Athanasius and Augustine, Ambrose and Jerome, Dominic 
and Francis, Bridget and Wilfrid, Boniface and Anselm, 
Ignatius and Philip Neri — that surely is an ambition that 
ought to inspire every Christian : to-day it is easy to get 
to Rome, and it seems as though the privilege were rather 
disesteemed. Yet from England, Scotland and Ireland 
there lacks not a great procession of pilgrims from the 
time of Ninian and of Patrick, who received his mission 
from Pope Celestine, and of Caed walla, that King of Wessex 
who, after Wilfrid had turned him to the Cross of Christ, 
would not be baptised save at Peter's feet. And in 689, 
just after his baptism, he died and was buried in the 
loggia of old S. Peter's. This human custom, this inti- 
mate habit of bringing one's ambition, or one's hopes, 
or one's penitence to the great saint, secured for primitive 
and mediaeval Christianity a note of the family which has 
been rather lost since, in Catholic Christendom, save 
amid the Latin nations. Of course the spirit is still found 
in northern, and even in non-Catholic countries, but it 
burns with difficulty, and its possession is not regarded 



i6 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE 

as a sign of the normal Christian Hfe. Rehgion to-day is 
too sohtary an affair. That terrible motto of Protestant 
individualism, " Nothing shall come between my God and 
my soul," is the denial of the Petrine spirit of primitive 
Christianity. Everything must come between a man's 
God and his soul : the cry of a child in the street, the 
demand of a beggar for his cloak, the sneer or the blow of 
an enemy, the love of a friend or a spouse — all these come 
between God and the soul : and it is the object of Christi- 
anity to turn these obstructions into aids, to realize that 
what comes between things joins them, and that God 
is found not in loneliness or in self-dependence, but in the 
least of these His little ones, in the cup of water, in the 
Broken Bread and the Poured-out Wine. The Saints and 
the Sacraments are the safeguards of Catholicism. 

And it is in this insistence on the human side, the 
popular aspect of religion, that Catholicism shows itself 
the true descendant of primitive Christianity. The 
instinct which brought the inhabitants of Jerusalem into 
the streets, with their sick, that the shadow of Peter 
might overshadow some of them, still lives in the driving 
motive which hales the peoples of the world to the Tomb 
of the Apostles. In the shadow of Peter men still seek 
health. Not that Peter can be found only at San Pietro 
in Vaticano. Origen long ago saw that every Christian 
might be Peter, the Rock, in the sense of the title bestowed 
by Christ : and Peter may be found everywhere. Still a 
natural affection will take Christians to the great shrine 
which the ages have raised to the Primate of the Western 
Church. 

There is a spirit, I thought, as I gazed up the long nave 
towards Bernini's baldachino, which grudges this gorgeous 
and magnificent memorial to the fisherman ; a spirit 
which complains, as a modern dilettante has done, that 
the Cathedral of S. Peter lies as heavily on the body of the 
saint as do the innumerable chapels which disfigure and 



S. PETER AND HIS BASILICA 17 

distract the memory of Wesley. It is a superficial 
criticism. Your Peter, your man of simplicity, of strong 
character and no great intellectual gifts, likes things to be 
magnificent : it is not the peasant nor the fisherman 
who is distracted by pomp, or would banish magnificence 
from the worship of God. That is a disease which super- 
vened on the rationalism of the sixteenth and seventeenth 
centuries : a disease that attacks not simple natures; 
but people who have no capacity for the gorgeous, who are 
fastidiously inimical to all that the natural man admires, 
who through a perversity of their temperament affect a 
simplicity that is far from their heart. S. Peter, in his 
life, would have loved S. Peter's just as he loved the 
Temple at Jerusalem ; it is — this enormous church — 
an expensive way of saying ** Thank you " to Almighty 
God ; but the plea of David is the plea of the plain man : 
" Neither will I offer burnt offerings unto the Lord my 
God of that which doth cost me nothing." 

It has become usual to say that San Pietro in Vaticano; 
enormous though it is, is so well proportioned that the 
visitor, on entering, does not realize the huge size of the 
building. I can never imagine the temperament of the 
person who first made this discovery. How did he forget 
so completely his own size and that of his fellow-creatures ? 
Directly Dominic and I got in, we were lost. One stands 
in a perfectly clear space — apparently no one else is near; 
and far, far off, where the twinkling of the lamps round the 
Confessio can be seen, are small, dwarfed figures that are 
other men. No place, to be frank, has ever so impressed 
me by its immensity as this cathedral. Whether one is 
looking up, or across, or at the great dome, or even simply 
standing beside a tomb or chapel, or walking past the 
image of S, Peter, everything around gives one a startling 
and certain sense of smallness. The church is so big 
that one hardly thinks of it as a building ; it is a city — a 



i8 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE 

city of fair colonnades and wonderful arches, a city 
peopled with how large and how illustrious a company. 
Every chapel is a separate house enshrining the memory 
not only of its name-saints, but of others who have been 
buried near the saints of their choice. When I was told 
by a friend to whom figures are not quite meaningless 
that Cologne Cathedral was less than half the size of S. 
Peter's, I was not surprised : and I am sure S. Peter's 
gives the impression of being very much longer than S. 
Paul's in London, although the actual difference is onlj' 
a matter of thirty odd yards. There are other cathedrals 
which impress me more by sheer beauty, or by wonderful 
proportion ; but there is no building in the world which 
so gives me the impression of being not only meant for, 
but adequate for, all nations ; no building that represents 
so fully the catholic aspect of the Church ; and that is an 
aspect which in Rome frequently gets lost. It is amazing 
to an Englishman to find how much the Italian standpoint 
is emphasized in Rome ; how Pius X. is really far more 
Bishop of Rome and head of the College of Cardinals 
than Patriarch of the West and head of the Catholic 
Church ; how the attention of Romans is given up to 
paltry local quarrels, and ridiculous details of etiquette, 
while the officials regard the real life of the Church, outside 
Italy, as something incidental to the prosperity of the 
Roman See. It is time that Catholics who are not Latins 
should begin to insist that the Vatican officials must 
realize that the Pope was made for Christendom, not 
Christendom for the Pope : and his Holiness himself 
should not so encourage the idea that he is Italian first 
and Catholic afterwards. The present College of Cardinals 
represents scarcely anyone save themselves, and a few 
prejudices forgotten everywhere except in Rome, and, 
possibly, among the more ultramontane sections of 
society in different countries. 

I remember discussing this aspect of Catholicism with 



S. PETER AND HIS BASILICA 19 

a priest — a Roman by birth, who had never been farther 
from the Eternal City than Assisi — who had much to do, 
in his official capacity, with receptions at the Vatican. 
We were talking about Modernism : he was a little shocked 
at the word, but did not mind discussing persons, and we 
went on to the case of Dom Romolo Murri and George 
Tyrrell. The first he knew well, and loved greatly, and 
indicated that the whole affair was a bad blunder ; that 

Murri had been unjustly treated — but ? And a shrug 

finished his protest. And Tyrrell ? '* Ah ! well, Tyrrell 
was a theologian. They do not like theologians here. 
I have read some of his books ; they are beautiful. But 
now — well he is neither Catholic nor Protestant." I 
tried to persuade him that Tyrrell's rather petulant, 
though singularly provoked, letters on the Encyclical in 
The Times were no sort of evidence against his Catholi- 
cism : that many saints had said far severer things against 
individual Popes. But the Italian point of view was too 
strong. The person of the Pope is in real danger of becom- 
ing a dogma of the Church in Italy. As another priest, 
an Anglo-Roman, once said to me, " Unless you have a 
devotion to the Holy Father, similar in kind to that which 
one has to Our Lady, you are regarded with suspicion at 
Rome." 

Well, as I could not get my Roman friend to budge 
on the Tyrrell question — simply, I am sure, because 
Tyrrell was English, and unknown to him — I attacked him 
about America. I mentioned curious instances of friendli- 
ness between Roman and other Catholics, and asked how 
the Propaganda dealt with them. " Ah ! " he said, 
"America! — America is a very long way off." That is 
a very fatal attitude, to my mind, for any official of the 
Catholic Church to adopt. America should be as near as 
Assisi, and Florida as familiar as Florence. The truth 
is that the theory of centralization, so intensified during 
the centuries since the Reformation, is being abandoned. 



20 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE 

unconsciously perhaps, but still surely, if slowly. And 
the reason, too, is not far to seek. Any centralization 
in the Church should be a centralization of affection, of 
devotion, not of government : in past ages men sought 
Rome not because Rome ruled the world, but because in 
Rome they found the common aspirations, the mean of 
Christian truth, the average of Catholic dogma preserved 
and expressed. To-day there is a danger — not entirely 
through Rome's fault — that Rome will represent not the 
mean but the extremes ; that she will be in the future 
not the soothing, composing, averaging power of Christi- 
anity but the exciting, provocative, disturbing element. 
This is a danger which all friends of the Church have seen 
coming since the time of Pius IV. ; and in the pontificate 
of Pius IX. it was first transformed from a danger into a 
principle. There is an old prophecy that no Pope should 
reach, still less exceed, the length of the first pontificate ; 
but Pius IX. outran Peter, and it is not good for the Church 
when its head goes beyond that which was accomplished 
by the Prince of the Apostles, when he abandons that 
business of guiding that was given him by Christ, and 
seeks to soar hke John, to teach like Paul, or to divert 
from its natural object the devotion that the Christian 
world gives to the Mother of God. 

When we had got over the sense of vastness inspired by 
the whole of the Basilica, and endeavoured to pay some 
attention to details, the feeling of being lost even increased. 
One could spend a time of pilgrimage without leaving San 
Pietro in Vaticano ; and I envied at times that Anchoress 
who, in the early days of Pio Nono, lived in a pillar of the 
vast church, and spent her life amid that inexhaustible 
medley of associations. Dominic and I had one or two 
special devotions to satisfy — there was the grave of that 
beautiful Gregory — him of Nazianzus — beloved of Mrs 
Browning and honoured by Ibsen ; the tomb of Gregory 



S. PETER AND HIS BASILICA 21 

the Great, " our father who gave us Baptism," and the 
monument to that gentle descendant of Charles I., Henry 
Cardinal Duke of York, with his father and brother. 

But except — and what an exception ! — for its devotional 
memories, the BasiHca does not contain much to arrest 
the attention. There is only one other name — in its world 
almost as significant as Peter's — which hangs over the 
whole building. Whether fairly or not, the grave plans 
of Bramante and the excesses of Bernini are forgotten, 
swallowed up by the gigantic fame of Michael Angelo. 
Is it not singular how those men of the Italian prime were 
never content with a specialist's reputation ? They 
were Jacks of all trades, and masters of all trades : above 
them all stand Leonardo and Michael Angelo. Leonardo 
da Vinci has written his name elsewhere than in Rome ; 
but Michael Angelo wrote his name with the Eternal City. 

By the walls, and in the heart of the old city, as well as 
here in the capital of Christendom, you cannot escape the 
name of Buonarroti. 

It is curious to think that in the period of art when what 
was called the Classical ideal was in possession of the critical 
field, men of taste could seriously discuss whether Michael 
Angelo or Raphael were the greater artist. Occasionally, 
as in the famous case of Reynolds, a great man perceived 
that Michael Angelo, however much he disturbed accepted 
canons, was at any rate incomparable, alone ; but the 
general tendency was to balance, with much parade of 
critical views and academic learning, the Stanze or even 
the Loggie of Raphael with the Sistine Chapel, and to 
speak in the same terms of admiration of works so different 
in conception and achievement as Raphael's " Transfigura- 
tion," Domenichino's ** S. Jerome," and Michael Angelo's 
" Last Judgment." The habit is still kept in certain 
modern guide-books, and yet it is difficult to believe that 
anyone who has any love for primitive or Renascence art, 
and any knowledge of modern painting, should fail to see 



22 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE 

that a world separates the master of the Sistine roof from 
the decorator of the Loggie, or the Stanze. I have always 
loved that wonderful Raphael who rivalled Perugino in 
the beauty of his colouring and the grace of his expression, 
while he excelled him in simplicity of composition — the 
Raphael of the Madonna im Griinen, the Madonna 
Granduca, and many other panel pictures where, for once, 
you find genius combined with facility. But to put even 
this Raphael beside Michael Angelo is what no friend to 
the gentler painter would do. Raphael should really 
have been the favourite artist of that odd school of semi- 
serious aesthetes who prattled of " art for art's sake " in 
the closing decades of last century ; Raphael, with his 
freedom from struggle, his detachment from spiritual or 
intellectual interests, his supreme technique and his in- 
exhaustible capacity should have been their god — not 
Botticelli, with his wistful, troubled Mary, and his sad 
Aphrodite, swaying on the conscious shell ; not Crivelli 
with his mannered, jewelled ladies and his pensive 
Bambinos — but Raphael, master of line, master of colour, 
master of composition — but not master of our souls. 

That is the secret of Michael Angelo : all his work, 
undeliberately, unconsciously, if you like, from any of the 
sonnets to the troubled, yearning lines of the Rondanini 
group, is crammed full with the passion of the unseen. 
He employs no tricks, none of the easy modelling devices — 
and yet the eyes of his Mary and his Christ are towards 
the unutterable, the invisible, the eternal. We came 
back again and again to the Chapel of Our Lady where 
stands the Pieta that he finished when he was a youth 
of twenty-three. It is the same Mary that one can see in 
the statue which is in Bruges Cathedral : sorrow hangs 
over the Lady of Bruges, grief has enveloped the Lady of 
the Chapel of Sorrow. And yet, even though this her 
Son is dead, Mary still gazes on him with a calm assurance ; 
she knows that, in death, as in life, her hope and salvation 




PI ETA 

MICHAEL ANGELO 



Sini Pictro hi I'a/i'cauo 



S. PETER AND HIS BASILICA 23 

is in the child of her womb. In the slack lines of our Lord's 
ankle, in the rested, yet still weary, pose of the head there 
is a note of grief that hardly appears in the hooded face 
of Mary, or the quiet lines of sorrow at her mouth. She is 
young, this mother, and Condivi has told the master's 
reason for keeping her young. " He," writes Condivi, 
speaking of the figure of Our Blessed Lord, " is of so great 
and rare a beauty that no one beholds him but is moved 
to pity. It is a figure truly worthy of the humanity which 
belonged to the Son of God and to such a mother ; never- 
theless, some there be that complain that the mother 
is too young compared to the Son. One day as I was 
talking to Michael Angelo of this objection, he answered : 
' Don't you know that chaste women retain their fresh 
looks much longer than those who are not chaste ? How 
much more, therefore, a virgin in whom not even the least 
unchaste desire ever arose ? And I tell you, moreover, 
that such freshness and flower of youth besides being 
maintained in her by natural causes, may possibly have 
been ordained by the divine power to prove to the world 
the virginity and perpetual purity of the mother. It 
was not necessary in the Son ; but rather the contrary : 
Wishing to show that the Son of God took upon himself a 
true human body, subject to all the ills of man, excepting 
only sin. He did not allow the divinity in Him to hold 
back the humanity, but let it run its course and obey its 
laws, as was proved in His appointed time. Do not wonder 
then that I have, for all these reasons, made the most 
Holy Virgin, Mother of God, a great deal younger in 
comparison with her Son than she is usually represented. 
To the Son I have allotted His full age.' " 

A world that began to indulge in ** realistic " paintings 
must have found this ** saying " of Michael Angelo's a 
hard and difficult one ; it is far removed, this vision into 
eternal truth, from the vivid accuracies of Tissot or of 
Holman Hunt, whose hard actualism replaced the academic 



24 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE 

accuracies of the later eighteenth- century painters. But 
to-day we turn back to Michael Angelo and the truth ; 
we are learning once more the value of vision, and the truth 
that a religious painter is primarily concerned with religion. 
In one of the most vital books on art that has been pub- 
lished recently we have a young Irish artist echoing the 
words of the Florentine master. 

*' In early Italian art the virginity of Our Lady is the 
great fact ; in late, the Motherhood. If a painter insist 
on the Motherhood, hi his painting, it is probable that he 
cares for nothing but the painting of it. Which is well, 
perhaps, for art, and art alone. He who would paint 
Virgin- Maternity must care for nothing (at the time) but 
the painting of Virginity. Both facts cannot be painted ; 
though, by the introduction into the picture of the Infant 
Son, the Maternity is acknowledged or suggested." ^ 

This is, perhaps, rather too strongly said ; but it is 
a truth that needs saying. I believe, however, that the 
only way of giving effect in art, either pictorial or plastic, 
to the motherhood of Mary is by the. artist striving to 
remember the mystery of the virginity. If he endeavours 
to depict that, " the rest will be added to him." There is 
far more of the divine mother, ay, and of the human natural 
woman, in the right hand of the Mary of the Piet^ than in 
all Raphael's motherly Madonnas. When Buonarroti 
decided to '* throw the Pantheon there up into the sky," 
he vowed he would do his work " for the love of God, the 
Blessed Virgin, and S. Peter " ; and the devotion that 
inflamed the old man of seventy had inspired the youth 
of twenty-three. His art was dedicated, and so his art 
was true. 

It is this attitude towards his subject which makes us 

of the modern world appreciate Michael Angelo far above 

any of the other Itahan masters, and put him, with his 

unflinching desideration for truth, in the same category 

* *' Art and Ireland," R. Elliott, p; 262. 



S. PETER AND HIS BASILICA 25 

as Dante. In the childhood of faith we may turn to 
Beato Angehco, whose art we can see in strange contrast 
with Buonarroti's here in the Vatican ; the frescoes at 
Florence or of the Nicholas Chapel more truly represent 
the simple, dovelike aspect of Catholicism ; Botticelli 
and Luini, Mantegna and Pinturicchio, in their so different 
fashions, satisfy the decorative feeling in Christianity — 
illustrations their pictures might be to the rapturous words 
of the Canticles, or such snatches at hidden beauty as 
" The King's daughter is all glorious within, her clothing 
is of wrought gold," or " Out of the ivory palaces," or 
'* The glory of all pleasant furniture " — Perugino, and 
Lippo Lippi and Raphael may conquer in things purely 
aesthetic; but Michael Angelo, and his great compeer, 
Leonardo, are the availing masters of art specifically, 
theologically. Christian ; they represent the spirit of 
man wrestling with God until the breaking of the day, and 
the naming of the Ineffable Name ; with them, as Our 
Lord said : ** the Kingdom of Heaven suffers violence and 
violent men take it by force " ; they feel, as did the 
Apostle, that upon them the ends of the ages are come, 
and they anguish to interpret heaven to earth, to reveal 
God to their fellows. 

As we were gazing at the frescoes on the Sistine roof, 
Dominic said to me, " Don't you think Michael Angelo is 
extraordinarily Roman ? I mean really Roman ; direct, 
trying hard, as does the Roman missal, to be simple, full of 
statement rather than suggestion." It is, I think, a happy 
criticism. In the shghtest sketch, even in the grotesque, 
of Leonardo you have a suggestion of the veil. In the 
curved smile of the Baptist, or the strong hands of the 
Madonna in the Diploma Gallery, is written not only 
mystery, but the consciousness of mystery, awe, and a 
certain indefinite happiness, so unearthly as to be almost 
sorrow. " In a glass, darkly," might be written under 



26 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE 

all Leonardo's work ; his Mary, his children. La Gioconda 
herself, and the Jesus of the Cenacolo might all have been 
painted, not from figures, but from reflections in a mirror ; 
they are all gazing out at the world and human life, not as it 
is but as it appears in the stream of consciousness ; their 
eyes are troubled with the vision of existence, seen not 
clearly, but as it was, years ago, by Plato's prisoners of 
the cave. 

How different the people of Michael Angelo ! " Et 
ecce velum tempH scissum est in duas partes a summo 
usque deorsum. Et terra mota est, et petrae scissae sunt, 
et monumenta aperta sunt : et multa corpora sanctorum, 
qui dormierant, surrexerunt." *' The veil of the temple 
was rent in twain from the top to the bottom " ; the three 
hours of darkness that followed the three hours of agony 
was the time in which the spirit of the painter of the 
Sistine Chapel wrought his works. For him there is no 
veil any more ; nothing between the vision of God and 
his genius except that inevitable darkness that covers the 
earth when man realizes what he has done to God. It is 
a shallow criticism which finds anything of the Greek in 
Michael Angelo : there is a great deal of the Hebrew — the 
" Last Judgment," in its tremendous overwhelming sense 
of sin and justice, is almost purely Jewish — and there is 
much of the stern Christianity of the early fathers : 
Tertullian, not Francis, would be patron of Michael 
Angelo. And if we are tempted to think that the religion 
of the Sistine Chapel is too hard for the Christianity of the 
Gospels, we must not forget the flabby spirit and the 
dissolute devotion, and the pious immorality of the age 
of Leo X. Where so many artists were prostituting their 
art and religion in the service of godless popes and pagan 
princes, Buonarroti fearlessly drags the Medici into the 
shadow of death, and puts the fear of judgment and hell 
into the hearts of the Roman Curia. His naked Noah and 
his hurrying Haman not only symbolized, like the earlier 



S. PETER AND HIS BASILICA 27 

frescoes at Pisa, Christian dogmas, but branded, as the 
simpler painters never tried to do, the vices and follies 
of his own time. Sixtus at first wished the designs on the 
roof to be concerned with the lives of the Twelve Apostles ; 
and we are told that Michael Angelo refused to be content 
with this subject because of its poverty. This can only 
have been an excuse ; for there are plenty of incidents in 
the Book of the Acts and in tradition which the painter 
could have employed in treating the Apostles. But we 
may believe that Michael Angelo felt it was time to give 
his patrons a sterner view of religion. No one can accuse 
the master of the Bruges Madonna, or the Holy Family in 
Burlington House, or of the David, of a lack of tenderness ; 
but surely it was pardonable that Michael Angelo should 
desire to provide a contrast, not merely artistic but re- 
ligious, with the sweet, aesthetic frescoes that Perugino 
and Pinturicchio, Signorelli and Botticelli had put upon 
the walls. None of them could aver that he had any lack 
of love for the Holy Family, Our Lady and the Saints ; 
but he thunders from the arches and ceiling of the Sistine, 
Are you fit to mix with Mary and her Child ? Have you 
reahsed what was necessary before God became man ? 
Here, in those hooded figures, peering into the centuries ; 
here, in the expectant images of the ancestors of Mary and 
Joseph ; here, in every incident of the Creation, in every 
fall and ambition of man ; here, in the folly and wisdom 
of the Israelites ; here, in the vision of the prophets and 
the vaticinations of the Sibyls ; here, in the Lifted Serpent 
and the agonized people ; here, in the natural strength 
and the natural weakness of men and women ; here, in all 
these, you must be ready to see the prelude, and the 
reason and the necessity of the Incarnation. Michael 
Angelo continues the Apostolic comparison between the 
first and second Adam, the patristic parallel of the first and 
second Eve ; and the Adam who draws from the Eternal's 
finger the breath and spirit of life is seen again in the 



28 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE 

tremendous Judge of that terrible parable over the altar. 
There are critics who have called the central figure there 
Jupiter; have accused the fresco of being pagan rather than 
Christian. I admit that the artist gives only one view of 
the Last Judgment; and the view is, perhaps, exaggerated; 
but there is nothing in it of pagan. That swift, denounc- 
ing Christ, that saddened and stern Mary, are far removed 
from the gods of the Greek or Latin Pantheon. Zeus 
is the embodiment of calm, impersonal justice ; he is, 
after all, the slave of the Fate behind the gods, that 
iEschylean destiny which awaits Olympus and earth ; 
the Judge here is full of personal feeling, full of that 
personal anger and disgust at sin and its consequences 
which so marks off Judaism and Christianity from all other 
religions. And if the vision seems too terrible, too one- 
sided, one has only to go back into San Pietro and look at 
Our Lady of the Pieta to realise that Michael Angelo 
knew as well as any man that " God so loved the world 
that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever be- 
lieveth in Him should not perish but have eternal life." 

It is his keen realisation of personality that always keeps 
Michael Angelo from being simply decorative. We may 
prefer the charm, the gentle perspective, the deliberately 
beautiful composition of the frescoes on the walls of the 
Sistine, if we look at them from an aesthetic standpoint ; 
but as images for a place of worship there is infinitely more 
of the religious spirit in the roof and the lunettes. The 
men and women start out into the life of the chapel ; 
you feel, as you gaze up, that every moment you become 
less real, and the frescoes more ; that they are instinct 
with a quickness and a vitality that is eternal ; that they 
are pictures of things not seen, and are set there for the 
judging, not the pleasure, of the people. " A question 
of modelling," the art-critic may murmur, but what con- 
cerns us is not the how but the why of these tremendous 
figures. You have got no nearer to Michael Angelo's 





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THE PROPHET JONAH 

■MICHAEL AN(;F.I.() 



77ie Sisdne Chaf>el. J he I'atiian 



S. PETER AND HIS BASILICA 29 

spirit when you have waded through pages about his 
technique, and about the hmitations of a sculptor's 
painting ; the lesson of the frescoes is the same, although 
their execution is admirable, and the treatment of the 
architectural features of the building superb. It is only 
nineteenth-century England that confounded bad art with 
didactic art ; until the divorce between religion and art — 
a divorce that is hastened after Buonarroti's death — it had 
not occurred to anyone that art should not be didactic ; 
indeed the old masters were too wise to imagine that it 
could be anything else, for the painter who pursues, con- 
sciously or not, art for art's sake is fully as didactic as the 
man who uses his craft to express the truth as it has been 
revealed to him. 

For many of us these pictures of the prophets are a 
keener, more transcendent commentary on the Messianic 
prophecy than anything that has been written in books : 
to their painter the " bodies of the saints which slept arose," 
and we have his eternal vision of the heralds of the dawn in 
Jewry and Heathendom, these rapt, ecstatic figures who, 
for all their Delphic enthusiasm, have, each of them, that 
inner certainty, that inalienable security that the know- 
ledge of God gives. Since the days of the Catacombs the 
Church has always given a great prominence to the person 
and prophecy of Jonah ; Jonah, who in his fate symbolized 
Our Lord's burial and resurrection, and in his prophecy 
anticipates the Christian teaching which binds in a common 
chain of suffering and expectation the whole of living 
things. Michael Angelo did not break with that tradition. 
As we leave the Sistine Chapel we turn back, and our gaze 
rests on the startling image that leaps out from over the 
'• Last Judgment" ; Jonah, delivered ab ore inferi : Jonah, 
preacher of doom, to whom was given the great lesson of 
salvation even for Nineveh, " that great city wherein are 
more than six score thousand persons that cannot discern 
between their right hand and their left hand ; and also 



30 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE 

much cattle " ; and the burden of Nineveh is the burden 
of Renascence Rome. 

When I read what I have written about Michael Angelo 
and then think myself back into the Cappella di Nic- 
colo V. I feel somewhat of a traitor. 

Beato Angelico is so intimately connected with Florence 
that many forget that his tomb is in Rome — in the church, 
surely, where he would soonest have lain, even setting 
apart its Dominican associations, had he had his choice 
— S. Maria sopra Minerva ; forget that we may turn 
from the magnificence of Buonarroti, the romance of 
Pinturicchio, and the realism of Raphael to the calm 
mediaeval beauty of the painter of Paradise — of Paradise, 
or may not Fra Angelico be called more truly the painter 
of the Transfiguration ? One's instinctive cry, standing 
within the Cappella Niccolina, is ** It is good for us to be 
here." With Francis of Assisi, Fra Angelico did more 
than any other man to bring back to Christians the child 
Jesus, the memory of the Incarnation and the power of 
God's life on earth. Here, looking at his rendering of the 
stories of S. Stephen and S. Lawrence, we feel not, as in the 
Sistine, that we are carried away into the eternal order, 
but that heaven is embracing earth, that " mercy and 
truth are met together, righteousness and peace have 
kissed each other," that the saints have condescended, yet 
how graciously, to mingle with our ordinary lives. But 
we must remember that this chapel was painted, not by a 
man who was artist first, but by one who had most vividly 
that vocation for the religious life, for following the counsels 
of perfection, which in this age men find it so hard to 
understand. A purely aesthetic view of Buonarroti's 
work is futile enough ; but with Fra Angelico such a 
standpoint is more foolish still. He does not compel, 
perhaps, to thought as does Michael Angelo ; but there 
must be few of us, who are Christians at all, who can look 



S. PETER AND HIS BASILICA 31 

except with some feeling of shame at the unflecked purity 
and spiritual abandon of his work. How unclean and 
how disquieted, how unfit to join in this life of sunshine 
and happiness, of self-sacrifice, and joy, must we appear. 
The danger of course is, when Christian devotion is pre- 
sented in so attractive a light, that we may, unrepentant 
and unshriven, claim to take our place with the Santa 
Famiglia. When the great truths of the Gospel are pre- 
sented so beautifully, so much in the spirit of a summer 
holiday, bathed in the light of the Fete Dieu or Lady-Day 
in August ; it is only children and those old people who 
keep the child's spirit who ought to rush into them un- 
consciously, immediately, and as of right. We, who are 
soiled with sin, we, who are anxious with experience, we, 
who are heavy with care, have no business to forget until 
we are forgiven ; or light any candles for Mary and the 
Bambino until, clad in the garb of humility, we have held 
the tapers of penitence and fallen prostrate in heartfelt 
contrition. So we must go to the Cappella Sistina before 
the Cappella Niccolina ; pass the Prophets and the 
Sibyls, before we come to the gracious, beneficent lives of 
Stephen and Lawrence. 

There are critics who find a certain lack of dignity in some 
of these frescoes, and a lack of ethical feeling. They 
complain that Stephen's figure in the frescoes where he is 
bustled along to the stoning place has technical defects 
of a grave character : it may be true — but I am sure that 
this curious, unbending and yet unresisting Stephen, 
pushed along by his enemies, gives most securely that 
sense of absolute abandonment which the saints have felt 
in their martyrdoms. When the Body of Christ is spat 
upon and bruised and buffeted, when the body of His first 
witness is mangled in the presence of the Apostle of the 
Gentiles, to all appearance evil is entirely victorious over 
good ; but the slack, limp, unenergizing pose of the body is 
symbolic of that tremendous effort of will by which God's 



32 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE 

servant has emptied his soul of his human desires and is 
dependent solely on the supreme will of his Saviour. 
'* The souls of the righteous are in the hands of God " — 
and never so much as when the fate and the lives of the 
righteous appear to be entirely at the mercy of Satan and 
his legions. 

It is for this reason that many of the most religious 
painters love to dwell on the sufferings of the martyrs ; 
they take a certain humorous enjoyment in showing to 
other Christians how the powers of evil are deceived ; and 
you get, certainly in Orcagna and Benozzo Gozzoli, sly 
touches of irony that betray the twinkle in the eye of the 
painter. Fra Angelico is never homely — he is too beauti- 
ful — but he is not without this suspicion of godly fun : 
his devil is the devil of the mystery-plays, but in Sunday 
garb, so to speak. In the story of S. Lawrence we have 
one of the most typical of the martyrdom tales ; and it is 
evident how the painter felt the contrast between the 
stately spiritual beauty of Lawrence's ordination and the 
stark and severe simplicity of his trial and death. How 
charming are the poor people — really poor, not merely 
penurious — in the fresco where S. Lawrence distributes the 
wealth of the Pope ; doubtless many of them came for 
sustenance to the friary where Beato Angelico lived. It 
is astonishing that any human being looking at these 
frescoes, or at the earthly-heavenly vision at Florence, 
should be able to write " the passion of existence for him 
was centred in the next life. His artistic method was 
the result of his detachment from terrestrial things." 
The truth is that ail Fra Angelico 's interests were on this 
earth ; but that he saw this earth as God's footstool, 
and its fields as the playing meadows of the saints, and its 
flowers as toys for the cherubim, and its mountains as 
refuges of God's seers, and its stars as jewels for the crown 
of Our Lady. Religion, for him, was never anything but 
a thing sacramental ; and to a sacramentalist every sod 



S. PETER AND HIS BASILICA 33 

of earth is sacred, every blade of grass sings its own h3mans 
and every river has its own antiphon to the undying 
psalmody of the ocean. Fra Angelico knows nothing of a 
religion detached from human interests ; and he cannot 
see a heaven more beautiful than the garden of his own 
Italy. He is the child among the Italian painters, and 
his vision of the religion of the Incarnation supplements 
Michael Angelo's vision of the religion of the Atonement, 
just as the theology of Alexandria supplements the 
theology of Hippo. -^ 

Dominic is not here to read this — I should say that 
Dominic is a priest and so speaks with authority on these 
matters — but I can hear his objection to a good deal I 
have written. " Yes ; but you have said earlier that after 
all the Petrine character is the one thing necessary ; 
S. Peter, not S. Paul, is the foundation rock of the Church, 
and doesn't Fra Angelico represent S. Peter ? Surely 

1 1 feel rather strongly that the religion of the Sistine ceiling is 
what is needed for many of the present-day heresies and folHes 
— pantheism, new theologies, Nietzscheism, and all the other 
revivals of discredited and dusty moral and ethical disasters. We 
have not quite got out of that steamy, seductive Parisian back- 
water into which Renan tried to divert the river of Christianity. 
One knows that Fra Angelico, though he might have been driven 
on his knees and compelled to tears, would have understood the 
splendid terrors of Michael Angelo's faith ; but your modern 
sentimental Christian, your popular preacher, who deals in what 
Dr Figgis has called '' religion with the claws drawn," shivers away 
with an unintelligent fear from the Cross and the Crucifix, from 
sin and the Saviour. And we must take care that he does not 
arrogate to himself the right to play in the meadows of Fra 
Angelico, in the sheepfold of the saints. " He that entereth not 
in by the door is a thief and a robber " : and the door is humility, 
and penitence, and a sense of sin, for all save those few who have 
kept their baptismal robe spotless ; and they are generally broken 
by the sins of others, and seared with the salt of alien tears. It is 
the modern man " who is not bothering about his sins " who must 
be pushed into the Cappella Sistina, and forced to see what sin 
has done, and what are the fruits of unrighteousness. 
c 



34 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE 

there is something not quite Christian — leaving alone the 
horrible condition the fresco is in — about that Last 

Judgment ? Perhaps it is not pagan — but " 

" Well, I think I will leave the reader to finish the dis- 
cussion on the first question ; but for an answer to your 
suggestion about the paganism of Michael Angelo — come 
and see what ancient Rome was like ! " 



CHAPTER III 

ROME PAGAN 
I 

The Forum 

BEFORE we had been two days in Rome, Dominic 
and I decided that it was useless to try and ignore 
the Rome of the Repubhc and the Caesars. No one can 
reahze, mitil he is in the city, how intimately and in- 
dissolubly the different Romes are united, and how im- 
possible it is to appreciate the early Christian Rome until 
one has seen the memorials of Rome pagan. In many 
cases, of course, the glory of pagan Rome is the triumph of 
Catholic Rome. Where Divus Augustus built a temple in 
honour of his imperium, the Popes dedicated an altar in 
honour of Our Lady of the Martyrs ; the Forum itself is 
guarded by the ruins of Santa Maria Antica, and by the 
relics of Santa Francesca, most honoured of Roman 
saints ; and the memory of S. Peter and S. Paul over- 
whelms all other thoughts when we enter the Mamertine 
prison. 

Still there is much of ancient Rome that remains, un- 
absorbed, unassimilated by the Rome that has succeeded. 
I know this contradicts — as Dominic reminds me — what I 
have written before ; but Rome is a contradictory city — 
why did I not remember to say that earlier ? Rome's very 
power of assimilation is shown by her instinctive rejection 
of certain things ; what she leaves, stands gaunt, naked, 

35 



36 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE 

nothing but a skeleton while life is still flowing in the red 
veins of her narrow streets, and throbbing in the pulses of 
her noble gates, and beating in the heart of her churches. 

The Forum, we agreed, was the first thing to see of 
pagan Rome. Most people see it in great discomfort, 
with a guide. They are formed into little groups ; and 
each little group is reminiscent of an Oxford lecture-room 
and a conducted tour — it exudes culture and impatience in 
about equal quantities. An inordinate amount of tabloid 
information is thrown about, and alas ! how little is ever 
digested. I suppose the knowledge is predigested and is 
like most modern dietaries of nuts and other non-flesh 
substances : they run through the body without con- 
veying any nourishment at all. Those who indulge in 
them go through all the sensations of eating, none of the 
trouble of digestion, and get none of the advantages of 
vitalizing food. We saw several little crowds running 
round obediently, and we avoided them all. I like the 
modern arrangement of the Forum. I never saw the 
old order, when grass grew over it, and you strayed into 
the ruins with a happy air of accident, only prevented from 
success by a corner of Hare's " Walks in Rome " peeping 
out of your pocket. But still I aver the present mode — 
turning all the ruins into a paddock and making it an open- 
air museum — is much the better. It is silly to pretend that 
before the days of the wicked Italian government the Forum 
was vastly more picturesque, and therefore was in a better 
state. In the Middle Ages the place was a rubbish heap, 
a quarry, a market garden, a buffalo paradise. Under 
the nineteenth-century Popes a good deal was done ; but 
much the most serious work of excavation has been accom- 
plished since 1871, under Rosa, and Lanciani and Boni. 
I have never understood the spirit which carps at good 
work because it is carried on under unpleasant auspices ; 
and if a great deal of destructive work — difficult to forgive, 
some of it, like the pulling down of the Convent at Ara 




IN THE FORUM 



ROME PAGAN 37 

Coeli — has been done for the somewhat aimless cult of 
Victor Emmanuel ; we must put against it the wonderful 
care displayed in discovering the treasures of the Forum, 
not least Santa Maria Antica, a building worth many 
Renascence palaces or convents. Nor do I understand the 
spirit largely indulged in by artistic writers in the seventies 
and eighties — which prefers its ruins to be "picturesque" — 
that is, decaying, tumbling, dangerous and dirty. I hate 
restoration as much as anyone, but why prevent pre- 
servation ? The men who used the Forum as a convenient 
place from which to " lift " marble, acted intelligibly ; 
but what can we say for the sentimentalists who bemoan 
the destruction of the Middle Ages and damn the efforts 
of the men who are trying to retrieve the disasters of 
previous epochs ? "I have no patience with these people," 
as Dominic said, when an English countess of our acquaint- 
ance spat on a two-lira piece which bore Victor Emmanuel's 
head and expressed a desire that it was not necessary to 
use " the beast's money." " Why doesn't the woman 
throw the coin away ? She takes good care to get her 
income in the coin of the country ; she ought to remain 
faithful to the old papal money." From which you must 
not gather that Dominic is a White; only, while quite inno- 
cent of all politics, he likes people to be thorough. But I 
know no place where it is so difficult to sympathize with 
the Holy Father, as Rome. "The Prisoner of theVatican ? " 
Yes ; but somehow one feels sure that the key is on the 
inside of the door. 

Is there anything more trying to the imagination than the 
Forum ? Perhaps those earlier pilgrims of culture, Rogers 
and the men of his time, could more easily evoke memories 
of Republican and Imperial Rome than we can ; the 
number of landmarks, the variety of ruins and the dreadful 
confusion of dates can only be overcome, I should imagine, 
by one who has lived in the Forum for about a year. In 
a couple of dozen yards one passes from the Rome of 



38 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE 

Tiberius to the Rome of Constantine, and from Constantine 
to Caesar. No sooner has one tried to picture the scene 
along the main street, with Horace sneering at some bard 
devoid of his own genius for commonplace and capacity 
for patronage — " non di, non homines, non concessere 
columnae " — than one is carried on to the days of Trajan, 
who satisfied, by the extant rostra, the growing demands 
for popular oratory. 

I beheve the right way to enjoy the Forum is to forget 
one's school books, forget one's Lanciani, give up trying 
to find the exact line of the Via Sacra, murmuring mean- 
while Horatian tags, and frankly appreciate the wonderful 
beauty of single remains — little bits of sculpture, heads, 
and columns and altars. It was while wandering about 
the Forum in this way that I realized fully the Roman's 
astonishing gift for portraiture. There was nothing else 
quite like it in the ancient world. It is true that in 
Egyptian art you have occasionally a most surprising 
verisimilitude ; but even in such a statue as that of the 
Letter-writer there is hardness of outline, a certain cruel 
conventionality that is lacking in the best Roman things. 
How wonderful, for instance, are the animals on those 
two huge blocks of marble known as the Plutei ; more 
wonderful, I think, are the sow, the ram and the bull 
than the human figures on the outer panels, for to 
achieve portraiture of animals without either caricaturing 
or humanizing them is a feat more difficult than attaining 
good representations of the human face and figure. It is 
in detail, homely, almost Dutch, in conception and design, 
that the Roman excelled. Even from illustrations and 
plans and descriptions I have never been able to admire 
the stupendousness of Roman architecture ; all their 
enormous works appear to me to have been done against 
the real Roman genius. The Romans were far too sensible 
a people, in their prime, to be affected by mere size : 
that is an Oriental heresy. And for this reason any one 



ROME PAGAN 39 

of the huge, inhuman, barbaric monuments of Assyria 
and Egypt is far more impressive than the Colosseum 
or the giant ruins of the Palatine. The Egyptian was 
sincerely the slave of size ; perhaps the vast emptiness 
of the desert, perhaps the horrible clearness of their 
religion, inspired by the hard outlines of the African cli- 
mate, made them servants of a meaningless immensity, 
but insomuch as their servitude was sincere it transforms 
such monuments as the Cheops Pyramid or the Ghizeh 
Sphinx into a certain overwhelming verisimilitude that 
might deceive, if it were possible, even the elect. In the 
same way the enormous winged bulls of Assyria, gazing 
out on humanity from the abysses of some nameless, 
bestial hell, can still terrify and astound. The great 
Roman buildings have nothing of this crushing, if false, 
impressiveness. When I read the accounts of the Colos- 
seum as it was, I feel sure that it was vastly less potent 
to charm and amaze than now, when with its gaping 
brokenness it testifies to the strength of the blood of the 
martyrs. And that huge golden Nero which swaggered 
in front of the Palatine — if we could see it, should we not 
think it vulgar — as vainglorious art always is ? All the 
diseased and decaying faiths and customs of the East 
swept into Imperial Rome, and the stern, clean lines 
of the Republic were made gaudy and common with the 
stucco and gilding of an alien architecture. Still in quiet 
streets the Roman artist worked on, doing his careful, 
veracious yet not unimaginative pictures of people and 
animals. I say ** Roman " — but we are in danger of 
forgetting that the Roman of the Republic and of the 
Empire was almost as much a mongrel as the English of 
modern times : any race that can colonize continuously 
and successfully will generally be found to be of a very 
mixed descent. In recent times scholars are inclined 
to give more and more prominence to the influence of 
Etruria on Rome : much that has been regarded as 



40 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE 

typically Roman — the roads and the drains — are probably 
Etruscan ; and the Etruscan contrived to live in the 
Campagna which the ancient and modern Roman alike — 
save for such adventurers as the monks of Tre Fontani — 
have allowed to be a desert for dogs and the dead. Still 
there is a very distinct element in Roman history, in 
Roman art, in Roman character which we may set down as 
typical of the Roman genius : only it is emphatically not 
the element which so many visitors to the Eternal City 
are apt to consider " Roman." The pomp of the city is 
Eastern, the grandeur of the city is Hellenistic, the im- 
perial position of the city is far more Christian and Papal 
than the product of native Rome. It is true that in Julius 
Caesar you have a man who embodies imperium in the 
best sense, just as Vespasian, in a lesser degree, does 
— but Caesar spent his youth in Asia and Vespasian 
was never a Roman. Your typical Roman was a man 
of intense if small ideas, a man of tenacious if narrow 
interests, a man of deep and national religious feeling. 
Cato, Cicero, Pompey,^ men who remind us rather vividly 
of the mid- Victorian Englishman — the English of the 
Manchester School, with a contempt for anything but 
solid worth, a dislike of anything flashy, or swagger, 
or foreign, are the typical Romans. Whether it is un- 
conscious knowledge of his own doubtful descent that 
makes the mongrel so arrogantly national, I don't know ; 
but there is the fact — that a Roman, who probably 
had an Etruscan ancestress and a grandmother from the 
provinces, prated of his ** Romanness " just as an 
Englishman who cannot go back three generations with- 

^ How typical is that anecdote of Pompey as Bacon tells it ! 
-' Pompey, being commissioner for sending grain to Rome in time 
of dearth, when he came to the sea, found it very tempestuous 
and dangerous, insomuch as those about him advised him by no 
means to embark ; but Pompey said, ' It is of necessity that I go, 
not that I live.* " 




THE COLOSSEUM BV NIGHT 



ROME PAGAN 41 

out finding Scotch, French and Welsh ancestors will 
blurt across Europe speaking nothing but English and 
boasting of his English blood, far more scornful of the 
foreigner than is some Hibernian Irishman who runs 
straight back to the O'Briens or the O'Donoghues. 

It is too often forgotten by men who are never tired of 
quoting the Roman empire as a model that the imperium 
was based on the destruction of the Roman character — 
that narrow, peninsular pride which saw nothing higher 
than the Seven Hills and nothing holier than the Shrine 
of the Vestals. And it is forgotten, too, that when Rome 
ceased to be Republican she ceased also to be strong : she 
was only saved by the Cross from going the way of Athens 
and Veil. It was by the deliberate debauching of the Roman 
citizen, by the policy of free food and free sports, 
by the practice of a slave-supported ease, that the gaudy 
triumphs of later Rome were achieved : every new 
conquest in Britain meant a fresh home ruined in the 
city, every inch of the map that was made red in token 
of the Roman power was reddened by the most vital 
blood of Roman citizens. An idle populace, sneering at a 
policy they disliked or misunderstood, supported by an 
army whose pretensions increased with its power, was only 
rescued from utter destruction by the foolishness of the 
Gospel. 

That is what comes into the mind of the lover of Rome 
as he stands and watches in the Forum how the Empire 
swallowed up the real independent Rome ; and when he 
sees what pathetic, what tragically futile, efforts were 
made by those degenerate Romans to pretend to a pro- 
fession of a character that was irretrievably lost. 

One of the most splendid records of Imperial Rome 
in the Forum is the Basilica Emilia, restored from the 
Republican building of Marcus Fulvius Nobilior, by 
Augustus and Tiberius. It was gorgeous with Phrygian 
marble, and adorned with the best Greek statuary — it 



42 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE 

was typical of the highest that the Imperial spirit could 
produce — just as the Colossus and the Theatre were 
typical of the worst. In front of this palace was a small, 
ancient shrine — Plautus mentions it in the Cucurlio — 
Cloacinae sacrum ; and Livy speaks of it as something 
immemorial, part of the history of the city. This temple, 
dedicated to Venus Cloacina — the Love that Cleanses or 
Our Lady of Purification — was burned down in a.d. 178, 
but carefully restored by the Rome that had ceased to 
worship there. It had stood in that spot, so Pliny says, 
since the war between the Roman and the Sabine, and 
there the two enemies had purified themselves, with 
branches of myrtle and prayers to Venus. The ceremony 
of purification had long been abandoned by the pro- 
fessionals of the Pretorian guard and the mercenaries 
of the Imperial army ; but Rome, for very shame, rebuilt 
the shrine to the Love that Cleanses, to Aphrodite, bride 
of Ares, to the friendship that follows strife. Nothing is 
more heartrending than this careful, antiquarian attention 
to forgotten and deserted gods : the altar that is too clean, 
too neat, is worse than the altar that is dusty. It is better 
to forsake and forget your religion than to turn it into " a 
monument of the historic past." 

Yet there must always have been a number of citizens 
who were not bribed into treachery to their old ideals. 
In the Flavian Dynasty the population of Rome was 
something under a million and a half, and the Colosseum 
probably held only about fifty thousand people. We may 
believe that in spite of the frequency of the shows there 
were a certain number of citizens, unaffected by Jewish 
or Christian ideas, who refused to be degraded for the 
echo of distant conquests. Yet the astonishing diffi- 
culty there was in stopping the spectacles is evidence of 
how secure a hold the worse ideals had on a large portion 
of the populace. 

The strongest and strangest difference between the 



ROME PAGAN 43 

Roman of the Republic at its prime and the Roman of 
the Empire is seen by the manner in which the emperors 
and their sateUites lose their sense of proportion and 
their capacity for self-control. In spite of that genius 
for talking which reaches its flower in Cicero — the Cicero 
of the letters even more than the Cicero of the speeches — 
and in Pliny, the Roman always had far more croocppoarvvii 
than the Greeks, who valued it so highly. Pericles and 
Plato and Sophocles are the only prominent Athenians 
whom one could think of as self -con trolled. A nation 
too often talks a great deal of the quality which it de- 
siderates and does not possess; and Socrates, with his 
passion for destructive analysis, ^Eschylus with his superb 
gloom, Aristophanes with his boisterous and acid wit, Alci- 
biades with his wanton insolence, Euripides with his 
melancholy scepticism, are far removed from the ideal of 
temperance, of balance, of assured and certain poise. 
Now it is this attitude of — at times rather irritating — 
sanity which the Roman of the Republic displayed. It 
makes the difference between Plautus and Aristophanes, 
between Virgil and Homer ; it inspired the poetry of that 
most Roman poet, Lucretius, and the conduct of Cincin- 
natus. Caesar had it, and had it very strongly, but with 
Caesar the passion for experience — surely a characteristic 
that led him very far, though we may discredit the stories 
of Suetonius — and his astonishingly fertile and acquisitive 
genius, kept the more sober qualities largely in sub- 
jection. 

After C^sar what Roman has it ? We find a pompous 
parody of it in Lucan, and a sentimental parody of it in 
Seneca ; but never a sign of it in any Roman emperor, 
except, possibly, Vespasian and Marcus Aurelius. If you 
would know how far the sense of proportion left the men 
whom Rome delighted to honour, look at the relics of the 
Hadrianic Empire : the huge villa at Tivoli built as a kind 
of memorial of the Emperor's travels, the Ponte S. Angelo 



44 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE 

and the Moles Hadriani — and as a tribute to the gods of 
heaven, the swinging dome of the Pantheon. 

The Pantheon is quite the most affecting, undoubtedly 
the most certain and successful, the least grandiose of all 
the Imperial buildings. It retains most of the simplicity 
of Republican Rome, while it has caught something of the 
spirit which animated Julius Caesar and, in a less degree, 
Augustus, who was responsible for its foundation. This 
all-holy place Hadrian restored, and gave to it its present 
wonderful dome, that vast expanse of celestial roof, 
pierced by the eternal eye, from which alone the building 
gets any light. This Pantheon — S. Mary of the Martyrs 
— is, had he known it, the worthiest claim to remembrance 
that Hadrian left : this comparatively small and modest 
building, which he restored to the honour of the gods of 
heaven. 

Then you have the Moles Hadriani — the monstrous 
tomb which a later age put under the guardianship of the 
great Archangel, the Signifer of God. This huge mass, 
at whose original splendour and wealth we can only guess, 
was, we may be sure, esteemed by Hadrian far above the 
Pantheon. This, and the great bridge which united it 
to Rome, seems more typical of the Empire than the 
Colosseum. And this was built to immortahze the 
Emperor's passion for Antinous, and to defy the death 
which Hadrian, unlike the Pharaohs whom he emulated, 
believed to end all things. 

More typical than the Moles, more typical than the 
Amphitheatrum, is the Villa. We still call it a villa. It 
was really an artificial continent ; a series of palaces 
and climates and environments ; a vast effort at recon- 
structing the past which held for Hadrian nothing but the 
weariness of things sought for and things achieved, of 
desires too superficially entertained and too easily satis- 
fied, of worlds that he could not conquer, because they 
were already his, of an adulation due only to God, and 








THE CASTLE OF ST. ANGELO 



ROME PAGAN 45 

given to a man. Here, on these miles of land, the Emperor 
bade his architects and gardeners and designers refashion 
for him the places he had seen in his travels ; and they 
did his bidding, and still the Emperor's soul was world- 
weary, homeless, the victim of dryness and accidie. 

" Animula, vagula, blandula 
Hospes comesque corporis, 
Quae nunc abibis in loca 
Pallidula, rigida, nudula 
Nee, ut soles, dabis jocos ? '- 

*' Soul of mine, gentle and quaking 
Guest of the body, and friend of it, 
Whither away art thou making 
Stiffening and naked and shaking ? 
Jesting ? Ah ! now is an end of it ! ' ' 

All that enormous expanse of garden and mansions, 
with the theatre, and baths, and hunting boxes, was built 
— simply for self. The very idea of self-sacrifice — that so 
potent instinct in early Rome, as the legend of Quintus 
Curtius and the cavern in the Forum testify — had been 
lost by the emperors. All the pomp and the glory and 
luxury subserved one purpose only — passion for self. 
There is something, Dominic insisted, of unselfishness in 
the Pantheon, with its recollection of God's mite, and in 
the Moles, with its tribute to passion and to death ; but 
if you admit that, what is there but self in the Villa, with 
its Greek beauty and its vast resources for pleasure ? 
And that is the spirit of the Empire — the spirit which 
the rulers had to encourage in the people so that their own 
absorption in it might seem normal and right. 

*' On that hard Pagan world disgust 
And secret loathing fell. 
Deep weariness and sated lust 
Made human life a hell. 



46 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE 

In his cool hall, with haggard eyes, 
The Roman noble lay ; 
He drove abroad, in furious guise. 
Along the Appian way. 

He made a feast, drank fierce and fast, 
And crowned his hair with flowers — 
No easier nor no quicker pass'd 
The impracticable hours.'' 

And there was lost too in Imperial Rome the sense of 
obedience. Before the growth of luxury, before the 
enormous increase in slave-labour, Roman discipline, 
like Roman decorum, was a quality that none could 
dispute. No doubt the beginning of bad was when such 
a man as Crassus, the richest of the triumvirate, amassed 
wealth by the to us familiar method of ground-rents and 
house-broking ; but the Imperial Forum, with its monu- 
ments of aggrandized families, its arches and tributes 
to individuals, bears melancholy witness to the excessive 
importance given to wealth. And when wealth can 
command allegiance the spirit of true obedience is broken ; 
every arch that meets the eye as you stand and look 
towards the Amphitheatrum Flavianum, from that of 
Septimius Severus to that of Maxentius and Constantine, 
is a symbol of the decadence of Rome ; the ruined palaces, 
the Basilica Julia, the Basilica ^Emilia, the Basilica of 
Constantine, the Temple to Caesar which jostled the 
temples of the ancient gods — each marks a step towards 
that inevitable decline which was finally accomplished in 
the rise of Christianity. 

It is, however, possible to exaggerate the extent of the 
Imperial evil : it is difficult to get any accurate notion of 
how many people resented the inordinate excess of the 
more extravagant emperors. For one thing, we hear so 
loudly the voice of the parasite that we cannot discern the 
cry of the objector ; for another, those objectors who do 



ROME PAGAN 47 

make themselves heard are forced to shout so loudly and 
to pitch their complaints in so extravagant a key that we 
hesitate to give credence to Juvenal's frightful attack on 
the Roman women, or to Tacitus' savage and sweeping 
diatribes against Tiberius or Nero. There must have been 
a good few who did not consent to the swindling and 
suicidal practice of drugging the conscience of the city ; 
the best of these either embraced Christianity or, leaving 
Rome, tried to uphold the Roman spirit in the villages — 
pagans, whose primitive faith was better than the obsequi- 
ous Christianity that was affected by the Court after Con- 
st antine's conversion. It is the memory of this simpler 
folk, a memory nigh buried under the groaning arches of 
the Principes, which alone makes the Forum anything 
else than a museum of Grgeco-Roman architecture and 
sculpture. We sought their footsteps and their memories 
in some of the older temples, where Imperial restoration 
at least spared the titles and respected the ancient sites ; 
we could remember them as we gazed at the Pons Juturnae, 
that spring at which Castor and Pollux watered their 
horses, stiU welling up as on the day when the Great Twin 
Brothers announced to the city the result of the battle 
by Regillus ; but perhaps the memory of Republican 
Rome clings most round the Temple of Vesta, sacred to 
the old religion of fire, tended by the holy order which 
even the Empire hardly availed to disturb. And near 
the House of the Vestals are the ruins of a small shrine 
which, with characteristic discretion, the Senatus Popu- 
lusque Romanus erected "to an unknown God." Here, 
too, in this house, may be seen the statues of the vestales 
maximae ; on the pedestals we read the strange, yet 
familiar names, Praetextata, Numisia Maximilla, Coelia 
Claudiana, Flavia Publicia. And then we were arrested 
by the sight of a pedestal from which the name had been 
carefully erased. Why? Prudentius, in his hymn on 
S. Lawrence, gives us the answer : 



48 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE 

" Videmus illustres domos, 
Sexu ex utroque nobiles, 
Ofiferre votis pignora 
Clarissimorum liber um. 

Vittatus olim pontifex 
Ascitur in signum crucis ; 
Aedemque, Laurenti, tuam 
Vestalis intrat Claudia.'' 

** Noble sons of noble sires. 
Daughters of a noble house 
Bring to us their young desires, 
Bring to us their eager vows. 

See ! the Priest of Jove, who takes 
Up the Cross whose sign he makes ! 
And the Vestal Claudia sped 
Where St Laurence' blood was shed." 

So the best and purest thing in Roman religion becomes 
absorbed in Christianity. The cult, first encouraged and 
estabhshed by Numa Pompilius, revered through the 
Republic, respected through the Empire, finds its true 
home in the heart of the Catholic Church. On Holy 
Saturday, at the blessing of fire and water, we have the 
real succession of natural religion, and the song of the 
Vestals becomes the song of the Church. 

Haec sunt enim festa Paschalia, in quibus verus Agnus 
occiditur, cuius sanguine postes fidelium consecrantur. 
Haec nox est, in qua primum patres nostros filios Israel 
eductos de Aegypto, mare rubrum sicco vestigio transire 
fecisti. Haec igitur nox est, quae peccatorum tenebras, 
columnae illuminatione purgavit. Haec nox est, quae 
hodie, per universum mundum, in Christo credentes, a 
vitiis saeculi, et caligine peccatorum segregates, reddit 
gratiae, sociat sanctitati. Haec nox est, in qua destructis 
vinculis mortis, Christus ab inferis victor ascendit. Nihil 
enim nobis nasci profuit, nisi redimi profuisset. O mira 
circa nos tuae pietatis dignatio ! O inaestimabilis dilectio 



ROME PAGAN 49 

caritatis : ut servum redimeres, Filium tradidisti ! O 
certe necessarium Adae peccatum, quod Christi morte 
deletum est ! O felix culpa, quae talem ac tantum 
meruit habere Redemptorem ! O vere beata nox, quae 
sola meruit scire tempus et horam, in qua Christus ab 
inferis resurrexit ! Haec nox est, de qua scriptum est : 
Et nox sicut dies illuminabitur : Et nox illuminatio mea 
in deliciis meis. Huius igitur sanctificatio noctis, fugat 
scelera, culpas lavat : et reddit innocentiam lapsis, et 
moestis laetitiam. Fugat odia, concordiam parat, et 
curvat imperia. . . . O vere beata nox quae exspoliavit 
Aegyptos, ditavit Hebraeos ! Nox, in qua terrenis 
coelestia, humanis divina junguntur. Oramus ergo te, 
Domine : ut Cereus iste in honorem tui nominis conse- 
cratus, ad noctis hujus caliginem destruendam, inde- 
ficiens perse veret. 

. . . Deus, cujus Spiritus super aquas, inter ipsa mundi 
primordia ferebatur: ut jam tunc virtutem sanctificationis, 
aquarum natura conciperet. Deus, qui nocentis mundi 
crimina per aquas abluens regenerationis speciem in ipsa 
diluvii effusione signasti ; et unius ejusdemque elementi 
mysterio, et finis esset vitiis, et origo virtutibus. ... Sit 
haec sancta, et innocens creatura, libera ab omni impugna- 
toris incursu, et totius nequitiae purgata discessu. Sit 
fons vivus, aqua regenerans, unda purificans ; ut omnes 
hoc lavacro salutifero diluendi, operante in eis Spiritu 
sancto, perfectae purgationis indulgent iam consequantur. 
Unde benedico te, creatura aquae, per Deum^^vivum, per 
Deum^-verum, per DeumHhsanctum : per Deum, qui te in 
principio, verbo separavit ab arida : cujus Spiritus super 
te ferebatur. Qui te de paradisi fonte manare fecit, et in 
quatuor fiuminibus tot am terram rigare praecepit. Qui 
te in deserto amaram, suavitate indita fecit esse 
potabilem, et sitienti populo de petra produxit. Benedico 
•i-te et per Jesum Christum Filium ejus unicum, Dominum 
nostrum : qui te in Cana Galilaeae signo admirabili, sua 

D 



50 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE 

potentia convertit in vinum. Qui pedibus super te am- 
bulavit : et a Joanne in Jordane in te baptizatus est. 
Qui te una cum sanguine de latere suo produxit : et 
discipulis suis jussit, ut credent es baptizarentur in te, 
dicens : Ite, docete, omnes gentes, baptizantes eos in 
nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus sancti. 



II 

The Palatine and the Mamertine Prison 

In a city that draws so much on one's emotions as does 
Rome, it would have been a pity to try and summon 
enthusiasm over what really, at first sight, left one cold. 
The Palatine did not excite me. Better perhaps to say 
that, with two exceptions, the ruins in the Palatine seemed 
negligible beside the other glories of Rome. The fact that 
Tiberius and Caligula each built a palace there, and that 
Nero's golden house, stretching to the Esquiline, covered 
a greater space of ground than does S. Pietro in Vaticano, 
gave me no pleasure. I was tired of Imperial extravagance; 
tired of trying to realize it, and besides there is a handier 
way to realization in the bitter sentences of Tacitus or the 
violent periods of Juvenal. Nothing on the Palatine 
reminds you of anything but the folly and the hard 
vulgarity of Imperial Rome, except the Domus Liviae and 
what is called the Paedagogium. 

The house which may have been built by Tiberius' 
father is by far the best example we have left of the general 
plan of a dwelling-place in the early Empire ; and it is 
difficult even now not to feel a certain sensation of breaking 
privacy as one stares at the frescoes of lo or Galatea ; 
peers at the leaden water pipes, and conjectures about the 
Roman plumbing, or examines the manner in which the 
connoisseur of the period preserved his pictures from 



ROME PAGAN 51 

damp. Here at last I got a sensation of real, ordinary 
life. In the remains of the other palaces I felt little but 
the shadow of dead ceremonial, and the thick gloom of 
disgraceful vice ; but here, when my thoughts were per- 
haps getting rather morbid, I was snatched back to the 
recollection that even in the Rome of the Empire, relations 
of the emperors were leading ordinary, domestic lives. 
Even the Court of Nero had its Acte ; and the Empire, 
gross obsession as it was, did spring from hearts that once 
had been human, and fostered ambitions that were, in 
the origin, not entirely diabolic. 

Acte, however, was a slave and — as an unduly neglected 
novel (by Hugh Westbury, I think) suggested — very likely 
a Christian. How many of the slaves that frequented 
the Paedagogium were Christians ? This building, close 
to the Stadium, was, as the blameless and bloodless 
Baedeker tells us, " a school for the Imperial slaves, who, 
like those of all the wealthier Romans, received a careful 
education." A careful education ! Wonderful Teutonic 
honesty ! No doubt the education was careful ; and what 
was it about ? It is Theodor Mommsen who suggests that 
American slavery is but a drop in the ocean of human 
cruelty beside the slavery of ancient Rome. That may 
be exaggerated ; but let those who want to know what 
kind of lives slaves led, what sort of amusements their 
''' education " induced them to practise, read Martial — 
Martial, the careless, cynical, practical worldling who 
cannot quite keep the cry of the oppressed out of the 
frivolous flick of his obscene epigrams. I can't quote 
Martial — even in Latin ; but let us see how the same 
problem struck an educated Jew — a provincial, no doubt, 
*' with a thick accent and an absurd emphasis on moral 
conduct as opposed to moral values " — as one hears some 
Roman lady of the Imperial times chatter — " so unlike 
our own dear Seneca." Martial may have met Paul, but 
I don't suppose he ever heard these words : " Know ye 



52 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE 

not that to whom ye yield yourselves slaves to obey, his 
slaves ye are whom ye obey : whether of sin unto death, 
or of obedience unto righteousness ? But (praise God !) 
ye who were the slaves of sin, have given heartfelt obedience 
imto that form of teaching which was delivered you. And 
then, when ye were freed from sin, ye became the slaves 
of righteousness. I speak after the manner of men, 
because of the infirmity of your flesh : I beseech you, 
as ye once yielded your members slaves to uncleanness and 
to iniquity unto iniquity, so, now yield your members 
slaves to righteousness unto holiness. For when ye were 
the slaves of sin, ye were free from righteousness. And 
what fruit had ye then from those things whereof ye are 
now ashamed ? Surely the end of those things was death. 
But now, freed from sin, slaves of God, ye have j^our 
fruit unto holiness, and at the end life eternal. For the 
wages of sin is death ; but the gift of God is eternal life 
through Jesus Christ our Lord." 

No one can really appreciate the Pauline Epistles, more 
especially those to the Romans and the Corinthians, 
unless they have a picture of ancient slavery in their 
mind. Most of the Christian community in Rome was 
probably slaves : what a temptation must the Gospel of 
Paul, with its wonderful insistence on freedom, its almost 
passionate denunciation of legalism, have been. And how 
wonderfully did S. Paul grasp the danger, and meet it 
without abating a jot or a tittle of his preaching ! 

Of course the slaves of the wealthy Romans, with a few 
exceptions, were not educated ; they were no more 
educated than a Strassburg goose is fed. They were 
stuffed. They liked being stuffed. They gorged and 
lusted and quarrelled and killed — ^let the Jew of Tarsus 
speak again " fornicators, idolaters, adulterers, extor- 
tioners — such were some of you," he cried to the Church 
at Corinth — and such no doubt had been some in the Roman 
Church. And they did not know it till the Jew told them. 



ROME PAGAN 53 

That is the mystery of iniquity in Greek and Roman 
civihzation. That is the sin against the Holy Ghost, 
which Aristotle sanctions, and Plato ignores. The slave 
had no soul, no rights, no duties. And not till the wind 
of God swept this, the Paedagogium, blasting that infernal 
falsehood, not till then can we say that the slaves were 
educated. 

That there were Christian slaves here we know from a 
hasty wall-drawing found on the wall and preserved in 
the Museo Kircheriano. 

One afternoon a group of six or seven of the boy-slaves 
were " ragging '' one another : and then a handsome, 
clever fellow, a Greek, proposed some foul way or another 
of passing the time. And the rest agreed — all but one. 
He is Alexamenos and has been a great friend of the other 
Greek, and in reply to entreaties and requests he con- 
fesses : " I am a Christian." The other has heard of the 
Jewish fools that worship a crucified criminal ; his sound 
Greek sense turns in revolt from this disgusting confession, 
and the next morning he scribbles on the wall a cari- 
cature of his companion adoring a figure on the cross. 
And he gives the Figure the head of an ass. " To the 
Greeks foolishness." What better commentary can we 
have on that text than this sneering, AXe^aixevoq a-e^ere 
TOP Oeov ? 1 

1 There is another theory that makes this graffito not a ribald 
sketch, but a confession of faith either on the part of a Gnostic sect, 
who identified Christ with Seth, and Seth with Seti — an ass- 
headed deity of Eg5rpt ; or of some eclectic person trying to revive 
a cultus of Seth. I do not believe a bit in this theory. Firstly, 
boys who are keen on religion do not draw devotional pictures on 
the walls of their school buildings, particularly when the religion 
is of so odd a kind ; secondly, there are no other graffiti in the 
Paedagogium which encourage one to think it was a likely spot 
for inscribing reHgious pictures. Thirdly, this modern theory 
leaves the cross quite unexplained. And the cross, though faint, 
is perfectly plain and visible still. 



54 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE 

Indeed this Paedagogium is the most melancholy place 
in ancient Rome. Here were trained the human watches, 
the human jest-books, the human freaks, the human 
machines who were, as Democritus advised, *' the limbs 
of the body, used each for his own end." Ignorant men 
had their reading done by slaves ; wealthy fools had their 
walking and their greeting of friends done through slaves; 
the slaves made jokes for stupid masters, and invented 
vices for filthy ones. They had no use, no personality of 
their own — yet their brains supplied much of the senti- 
ment of Seneca, and most of the learning of Pliny. They 
were like the piles on which Venice stands, as necessary and 
as forgotten ; and when they failed, Roman civilization 
crashed down, as Venice will fall when her foundations 
give : and that spiteful scratching on the wall is the symbol 
of the power that shook the slavery of Rome. 

One morning Dominic and I had got up rather late and 
were not out in the streets till nearly eleven o'clock. I 
know nothing so fresh and so startling for Northerners as 
the changes of Roman weather in the early days of the 
New Year. In London or any English town one knows 
sufficiently what degree of warmth to expect directly the 
first breeze of morning whispers up fiom the river to the 
narrow and the broad streets of the city. In Rome it is 
quite otherwise. You leave your hotel to walk in a street 
that is dipped in dark, cold shadow ; you shiver slightly, 
and gaze up wonderingly at the strip of blue sky that 
stretches taut and firm above the high roofs of the houses. 
Then you go on until you are standing in one of the great 
piazzas — that of the Spaniard, or the more homely one 
of the Tortoise Fountain, or, best of all, in front of S. 
Peter's Basilica — and behold the whole world is bathed in 
glowing, warm sunshine. The citizens have discarded or 
opened their overcoats ; the jets of the fountain play 
with the sunlight like children with soap bubbles, and the 




FROM THE DOORS OB^ ST. PETERS 



ROME PAGAN 55 

blue above you is vast, domelike, full of Italy's eternal 
spring. That was an experience which we had on many 
mornings. It was an auspicious winter, that winter of 
our pilgrimage. It rained, it is true, but always between 
sunset and sunrise ; so that in the early morning you got 
the most beautiful grey-blue effects against the broken 
pillars of Trajan's forum, or the long flight of steps that 
leads up to the Church of the Altar of Heaven. 

It was just such a morning when, as I said, we got up 
late. Our late rising had rather disturbed the plans for 
the day ; and we wandered, a little aimlessly, towards the 
Forum, discussing what we should do with the rest of the 
morning. Suddenly Dominic remembered. ** We haven't 
seen the Mamertine." It was true. So we turned aside 
and entered the prison which, more than any building 
in Rome, is associated with Republican and Christian 
memories. 

No one knows what the Mamertine was in origin. It 
may have been a well-house, or a tomb, or even an 
ancient temple, in which case the lower chamber might 
have had uses not unconnected with the mysteries and the 
sacrifices. Anyway it is one of the oldest things in Rome. 
Livy says that it was built by Ancus Martins, and calls it 
" Career imminens foro." It was used, in Sallust's days, 
as a place of execution as well as a prison. It was repaired 
in the principate of Tiberius, as is testified by an inscrip- 
tion on the facade. Perhaps it is exaggerating its political 
importance to compare it, as does Nichols, with the Tower 
of London. Jugurtha, who was starved to death in the 
lower cell, and Vercingetorix are the two most heroic figures 
of pagan history connected with the Career. For us, of 
course, the prison is indissolubly associated with the name 
and the confinement of S. Peter. It is not certain whether 
Peter was imprisoned in the upper or lower chamber. In 
his day the only entrance to the lower cell was by a hole 
in the floor of the upper, which itself had a similar access : 



56 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE 

prisoners were let down by ropes, and there left to rot or 
starve. Tradition says that the lower cell was that occupied 
by S. Peter and S. Paul ; but the tradition is late, and if 
we suppose that he wrote an epistle while in jail it is 
almost certain that he occupied the upper cell. The 
tradition is encouraged by the spring of water which is in 
the lower cell and whose origin is thus given in the Breviary : 
" At the time that Peter and Paul were kept in prison, two 
of the guards, Processus and Martinianus, with forty others, 
stirred by the preaching and miracles of the Apostles, 
turned to the faith of Jesus Christ, and, when a spring 
suddenly burst out from the rock, were baptised." To- 
day both cells are easily visited by pilgrims, as a staircase 
has been built. 

After we had gazed at the scene of the Apostles' im- 
prisonment — for in one or other of the cells they certainly 
were — we went on to the quaint little Church of San 
Giuseppe dei Falegnami, above the prison. It was getting 
on to noon, and there were not more than half-a-dozen 
worshippers in the building ; we knelt down to say the 
Angelus, and were just going out again, when a priest 
entered to say Mass. We had not heard Mass that morn- 
ing, and so we agreed to stop. 

It is always interesting to hear and assist at services in a 
foreign country. Habits of reverence, habits of devotion, 
are so totally different in different places. The celebrant 
was served by a man who would have been declared 
dreadfully irreverent by any English priest. He rarely 
did less than three things at a time. For instance, while 
he was saying the Preparation with the priest he was 
lighting the candles, and also carr3dng vessels from one 
credence to another. Yet he was not inattentive. He 
never missed a " Cum spiritu tuo," or a " Kyrie eleison." 
And as the Mass proceeded, though he got, if anything, 
brisker and more businesslike, he was never — what shall 
I say ? — in that state of commonplace contentment that 



ROME PAGAN 57 

you may see in some English churches. He was eminently 
alive ; he was used to the mystery at which he was assist- 
ing, but it had bred with him, not a sleepy acquiescence, 
but a kind of hurried attachment, a breathless and quick- 
ened affection. The famous passage in '* Loss and Gain," 
in which Newman defends the hurried saying of the Mass, 
has always seemed to be nonsense — clever and mischiev- 
ous nonsense ; the argument he uses (or rather that his 
character uses) if pressed to a conclusion would compel 
us to dispense with words altogether. But this server, 
in his appearance, in his movements, in his whole 
atmosphere, almost justified the words of the English 
cardinal. 

The odd thing was that the priest was the exact opposite 
of his server. It is often difficult to hear any of a Low 
Mass abroad except the Preparation, a *' Dominus vobis- 
cum " here and there, and '* Ite Missa est.'' But this 
priest spoke every word so distinctly, so slowly, that I 
wondered what would happen when he came to the Canon. 
Wliat happened was worth staying for. The whole of the 
Canon was said quite out loud — that is, I, who was kneeling 
a good three yards from the celebrant, could hear every 
word. It seemed extraordinarily suitable that here, over 
the most ancient building in Rome, over the spot where 
Peter had baptised his jailers, and possibly afterwards 
said Mass for them, a return, however unconscious, should 
have been made to the primitive and mediaeval custom of 
the Church, and that we should hear the great Canon 
spoken ore rotundo. Never before, and never since 
(though I have heard some other priests in portions of the 
Canon), had I heard the great roll of Roman martyrs: 
" Communicant es et memoriam venerantes . . . Lini, 
Cleti, dementis, Xysti, Comelii, Cypriani, Laurentii, 
Chrysogoni, Joannis et Pauli, Cosmae et Damiani " ; then, 
after the action, that other bede-roll of holy names : " Cum 
tuis Sanctis Apostolis et Martyribus : cum Joanne^ 



58 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE 

Stephano, Matthia, Barnaba, Ignatio, Alexandre, Mar- 
cellino, Petro, Felicitate, Perpetua, Agatha, Lucia, Agnete, 
Caecilia, Anastasia." The names rang softly in the little 
church, each name carrying with it its own fragrance of 
suffering and self-sacrifice and love. How typical of the 
Roman genius is that page in the Missal ! It hedges in 
the supreme act of consecration, the utterance of the awful 
words by which the bread and wine become the Body and 
the Blood, hedges them in by those two little lists of names. 
Not presumptuously are the names of the local sufferers 
dragged in. No. The first list begins with the glorious 
name of the Mother of our God and Lord, Jesus Christ, 
and then, running through the Apostles, glides insensibly 
into that list of Bishops who ruled and saved and bled for 
the Church of Rome. And just as Peter is brought into 
the heavenly places under the cloak of Mother Mary, so 
those maidens who followed Christ to the Garden of the 
Vatican, or the games of the Amphitheatrum, ascend up 
the ladder of glory after the swift heels of him who outran 
Peter, and of him who first died for Jesus, and of the Son 
of Consolation, and of the man who had the tact and the 
righteousness to take the place of the traitor. Agatha, 
Lucy, Agnes, and Cecily — their broken bodies healed — 
unite in the sweet task of praising God with us for the 
Adorable Sacrament of the Altar. It is by this bold 
appropriation of sanctity, this childlike passion for being 
at home in heaven, that the Roman and Catholic Church 
keeps her hold on her children. No longer does she add 
names to the Canon of the Mass — I wish she and other 
churches did — but she does not forget the poor and humble 
any more than she did in the days of Cosmas and Damian. 
The two most democratic things in existence are the See 
of S. Peter and the Roll of the Canonized. A peasant 
and the son of a peasant is now in the Chair of the Fisher- 
man ; and all over the Catholic world altars and chapels 
are being built in honour of an illiterate shepherdess who 



ROME PAGAN 59 

was condemned by the doctors and lawyers and burnt at 
the orders of a bishop. 

And it is this note of democracy, of repubhcanism, of a 
starthng and splendid equality before the throne of God 
that one aches for, after viewing the ruins of Imperial 
Rome. There at Mass in the little Church of the Guild of 
the Carpenters we worshipped Him who was known as 
the Carpenter's Son, and the huge, tumbled grandeur of 
the Palatine and the insolent self-aggrandizement of the 
Caesars were forgotten, forgotten while we heard the 
names of Lawrence and Damian, of Cecily and Agnes — 
the name of Caesar's slaves and victims, names repeated 
daily in countries where the fame of Imperial Rome is 
known only by that catalogue of Roman criminals. 



in 

Roman Sculpture 

There remained, before we could turn to Christian 
Rome, the great galleries of sculpture. In them, in the 
galleries of the Vatican, the Campidogho, the Conserva- 
tori, and, more than all, in the Terme, the modern pilgrim 
can have a pure and unalloyed pleasure, can indulge 
freely in sentiments of astonished admiration for the fierce 
competence, the unflinching literalism of the Roman 
spirit. I suppose no one, except a few of the French 
revivers of an ancient mode of art, ever believed that 
realism was a discovery of the nineteenth century. The 
naturalism — even Zola's naturalism — which was raised to 
a creed in that odd, distant period of which Mr George 
Moore is almost the only survivor, was not born in France. 
Even if we take naturalism in literature, Richardson and 
Fielding, Bunyan and Defoe wrote easily, untroubled by 
thoughts of a dehberate theory, and so achieving a realism 



6o A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE 

that still lives, pulsates with blood, and is quick with passion 
and sorrow. And before them there had been Catullus — 
and in sculpture, the man who wrought the ** Seated 
Boxer " in the Terme Museum. 

Modem criticism gives this work to a Greek, working in 
Rome ; if it be so, and not the work of some Roman of 
genius who had learned the Greek technique, it is a most 
astonishing instance of how the Roman spirit caught even 
the Greeks. Here is illustrated the exact opposite of the 
Roman poet's cry : 

** Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit, et artes 
Intulit agresti Latio. ■' 

Nothing could be more removed from the Greek spirit 
than this vivid presentation of a momentary pose : the 
bruised cheeks, the battered temples, the absence of any 
attempt to render a type rather than portray an individual, 
stamps the work with the very note of Roman art. We 
can see the Roman patron, possibly stung by some such 
taunt as fell later from the Hps of Juvenal, turning with 
indifference from the Hellenistic statues that all his 
friends were buying, and demanding from his sculptor 
something " really Roman.'' " Why not do Dares there 
— ^look at him, look at that leg ; there's modelling for you ! 
Eh ? " And the supple Greek consented. And here we 
have immortally preserved the thing that Rome dehghted 
to honour. It is better, to my mind, than the Colosseum : 
it is sincerer — it has at any rate the quality of revealing 
personality, whereas the larger monuments of Rome seem 
to reveal only pride and vainglory and that vague distrust 
that was at the heart of the city. 

That distrust you may find exemplified by other statues : 
you find it, to my mind, most acutely in two. 

Praxiteles, who under the influence of Phryne did more 
than any other man to divert Athenian art from austerity, 
brought into it a lyrical cry that reaches us still through 



ROME PAGAN 6i 

the Roman copies of his most famous works. His art is 
the first to be troubled by a vague passion ; in him was 
lost that complete simplicity of statement, in him the 
flesh and the body cease to be ordinary natural things, 
and become vehicles for thought, for introspection, for 
delight and despair. It may be this was a judgment on 
him from Aphrodite. When he had completed the statue 
which Cos refused, and Cnidus accepted, the epigram- 
matist wrote : 

"'A K^TT^i? rdv J^vTrpiv evl K.vlS(p eLirev iSov(ra 
^6u, <j>€v, TTOv yvjuivrjv ciSe fjL€ Tlpa^iTeXf]^ ; " 

From that moment we may believe that the goddess of 
love disturbed the artist's soul ; and as an expression of 
that discontent he carved the "Hermaphroditus." How 
far the statue, now in the Terme Museum, follows the lines 
of Praxiteles is uncertain ; but here we have the shadowy 
fear of life, the occupation with an unreal beauty, the 
revolt against the splendour and sanity of nature revealed 
in its most amazing and terrible form. 

" Love made himself of flesh that perisheth 
A pleasure-house for all the loves his kin ; 

But on the one side sat a man like death. 
And on the other a woman sat Uke sin. 

So with veiled eyes and sobs between his breath 
Love turned himself and would not enter in." 

The "Seated Boxer" and the " Hermaphroditus ": still 
the trouble of Imperial Rome haunts us, and the secret of 
that trouble may be learnt from those two statues wrought 
for the delight, possibly, of the same man. 

It may be urged, however, that the ** Hermaphroditus " 
is, after all, the presentation in marble of an ancient legend; 
that Rome did not find, but borrowed, the legend, and so 
the statue must remain not quite typical of the Roman 



62 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE 

spirit in its ambiguous weariness and distressful agony of 
flesh. 

'* World conquest and world -weariness, 
The beauty that strives not, but gains ; 
The pleasure amorous of pain's 
Half-poison'd blossom, the distress 

Of surfeited desire, the slow 

Perplexity of death in life, 

Lust, that takes cruelty to wife, 
And heartless longing, come and go 

On the curved, pouting lips that smile 

Not happily, not sadly, but 

As though indifference had shut 
The gates of heaven and hell, the while 

The poor, bewildered spirit flies 

From death to death, and seeks to still 
The broken clamour of the will 

Beneath the hard Egyptian skies." 

Come to the Vatican. Come, and pause in the galleries 
before the statue of Antinous. Here surely is the weari- 
ness, the tired desire, the aimless, fruitless lust of Imperial 
Rome. He stands there, the Bithynian slave in whose 
honour the Emperor built temples and founded a city ; 
he is the god of Roman Hellenism ; on his lips there is the 
melancholy born of frustrated hopes, born of dry and futile 
despair. His eyes are set looking down on the waters of 
the Nile where he found the rest denied him in the 
Emperor's palaces, a peace that he had not known in the 
sheltered indolence of his captivity. What was it that 
drove him into the cool embrace of the ancient Nile ? 
Did he, like Narcissus, become enamoured of his own 
reflection, at the broad, swelling bosom, the slim ankles, 
and the lean desirous limbs ? Or did he feel that this 
mystical Egyptian river held secrets as strange as his own, 
and more potent, and so, in a bewildered anger, fling him- 
self on that adventurous journey ? Or did he rather, on 
some starlit night, steal from his bed and stand gazing, 




ANTINOUS 



ROME PAGAN 63 

gazing at the water scarcely stirred by the slow dip of the 
broad paddles ? And then, as he gazed, he remembered 
the years, not so long since, when he had bathed in his 
own Bosphorus and was clean and innocent ; and a great 
aching came over him, as he saw in the waters of the Nile 
the waters of his own river ; and deep down the memory 
of dead and half-forgotten companions called him, and the 
idle dreams of youth, and the cherished ambitions, and 
youth's passionate, ennobling love — and without a cry 
the creature of Hadrian slipped into the merciful water, 
the water that should slake the thirst of his shame and 
leceive the broken, beautiful body. 

Did he gain peace ? We question the statue in vain. 
Its eyes are heav}^ with the dreams of Egypt ; but they 
reveal nothing of the soul. There is nothing in the marble 
but a temperament and a body, strangely and terribly 
beautiful. It is not a Greek beauty. They are wrong 
who say there was anything of the Greek in Hadrian's 
ignoble passion for the boy that he bought : worlds lie 
between that Imperial insolence and the love which Plato 
glorified. Platonic love was of the soul, and touched the 
things of the spirit, even if it stooped to the things of the 
body ; this passion of Hadrian's was nothing but the 
curious, mordant affection of the body and the mind. 
And so that love — if we call it love, which slays love — 
and that beauty — if we may call that beauty which breeds 
weariness and satiety — must in time dispossess the heart 
of the knowledge of true love and true beauty. Natural 
things cannot linger with the cowardly, troubled affection 
of Antinous. His image has neither the splendour of 
Apollo nor the sublimity of Aphrodite ; it is a lost world 
that clings to his name, and a lost people that climbs to 
his shrine. He has nothing to offer — nothing but sudden 
death, and death in the great desert, death amid the horrible 
half-human, half-divine things that still haunt the low-lying 
plains of the Nile. Antinous is the sensuous counterpart 



64 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE 

of those ambiguous deities that came, on a day, chattering 
from the streets of Cairo and the gates of HeHopoHs ; 
came, when the cry of " Pan is dead " had shaken the reeds 
of the Ihssus and stirred the grass by the Tiber, came at a 
run to the ancient, obscene desert, where death and the 
vulture reign, the desert that the immobile Sphinx guards 
and symbolizes. And when Antinous dropped into the 
Nile, the Sphinx claimed her true worshipper ; all the old 
gods, Pasht and Anubis and Apis had come to her ninety 
years ago, and now at last comes the latest of the deities, 
part woman, part brute, and part god, and loses himself 
in the great river, the river that bears through the wilder- 
ness all his secrets to the Sphinx his mistress. 

This is the god of Imperial Rome. In his honour — or 
rather with him as the excuse — and his own aesthetic 
egotism as the reason — Hadrian founded Antinopohs near 
the spot where his slave was drowned ; and all over the 
Empire sculptors were busy representing that petulantly 
melancholy mouth, the shadowy brows, and the unseeing 
eyes of the Bithynian ; to a world weary of complexity 
and civilization this was aU that its ruler could offer. 
Rome, I sometimes feel, created only this : the Roman 
character was the gift of Heaven, the old Republican 
character that we can all praise and criticize ; and when 
that character corrupted, when that temper was debauched 
and debased, we are given this to worship, this to adore. 
It is the last disastrous disease of a falling people ; no 
longer, as in that dim past, when the Kadeshim worshipped 
Astarte, and Atys was pursued by the lions of Cybele, do 
men, in their own persons, adore uncleanness and im- 
potence ; but in a more degraded humiliation of despair 
they pay divine homage to the symbol of another's sin, 
and offer incense to him whom the Emperor purchased 
and dishonoured. 

Of the purely Greek things in the Roman museums — 



ROME PAGAN 65 

so beautiful a thing, for instance, as the fragment of the 
** Throne of Aphrodite " — I am not going to speak. They 
tell us nothing of the secret of Rome. And of the more 
famous works, the " Laocoon," the three Venuses, the 
''Apollo Belvedere," the " Apoxyomenos," the " Boy with 
the Thorn," " The Nile," with his sixteen putti, the 
" Dying Gaul," the Ludovisi " Juno," what need is 
there to write ? I would only warn others against the 
danger we all fall into of being slightly too indifferent 
about the more familiar things of art. It is a poor 
kind of originality that is unable to love what the 
many have loved, for no better reason than that the 
beauty is too well known. On the other hand, it is equally 
foolish to drag one's soul into loving merely because the 
crowd has loved. I did find the "Apollo Belvedere" 
disappointing : it is smooth, mannered, lacking in virility 
and force : and the " Laocoon " stirs rather to awe than 
to admiration. It is amazing : but ought it to have 
been done ? 

Few things in any art, however, have given me more 
pleasure than that figure of the Nile with his jolly (it is 
the only word), symbolic amorini. This placid, Zeus-like 
god with his reed-like hair, and his big, careless pose, is 
one of the most satisf5dng figures in the world. How 
good is the right hand with its bundle of bulrushes, how 
splendid the effortless attitude of the left shoulder, how 
admirable the artful, yet seemingly artless, disposition of 
the putti. After all, if this was admired in Rome, it does 
tell us something of Rome's secret : it tells us, as I have 
been forced to remind myself before, that there was always 
a remnant that did not bow to the Baal of the divine 
Princeps ; and the little company who ordered this work 
for the Temple of Isis were keeping alive the love of a 
true and pure art, were guarding the treasure that was to 
pass to the Delia Robbias and to Donatello. 

There is one other statue which I could never pass 



66 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE 

without the profoundest emotions of pity and wonderment. 
In all the gallery of Roman emperors is there any more 
difficiilt to understand than Marcus Aurelius ? The busi- 
nesslike genius of Augustus, the wicked folly of Nero, the 
nervous, bruised idiocy of Caligula, the force of Vespasian 
or Nerva, the pedantic piety of Julian — ^how like Julian 
is to our own James I. ! — all these are intelligible. But 
what man can understand Marcus Aurelius ? His father 

is just human : but he ! We still read, many pretend 

to admire, the '' Meditations " ; but how totally is their 
spirit removed from anything that the most stoic of us 
can ever feel : 

" When you are offended at any man's shameless 
conduct, immediately ask yourself. Can it ever be that 
shameless men should cease to exist in the world ? It 
cannot. Ask not, then, what you can never have. The 
man who has offended you is one of those shameless men 
who must always, must always exist in the world. 

'' Argue in the same way when you meet a knave, or a 
fraud, or any man who does you wrong in any way. And 
then you will find that so soon as you remind yourself 
that these men must exist, you will be more kindly 
affectioned towards particular offenders." 

I do not wonder that Marcus Aurelius was disliked ; 
and I wonder less that he persecuted the Christians, and 
least of all that his son was a failure. How horrible, how 
truly damnable is this cold, impersonal method of treating 
sinners ! As I look up at the wonderful statue that stands 
at the top of Michael Angelo's steps, on Michael Angelo's 
pedestal, I feel a profound sorrow for the stoic emperor. 
That, then, was the best philosophy that ancient Rome 
could produce ; this calm, bloodless dealing with men as 
so many instances of a universal law. Worse than all 
prisons, worse than torture, would be this maddening 
insistence that some poor, foolish, guilty criminal was just 
a new specimen of a universal class ; this spirit, as much 




MARCUS AURELIUS 



ROME PAGAN 67 

as the spirit of lust and cruelty, was anti-Christian, and 
had to be fought and conquered by the Church. 

For years, by an ironical twist of fate, the great statue 
of the Great Stoic was mistaken for one of Constantine, 
and so preserved for us to see Roman portraiture at its 
highest. And here it stands, between the Capitol Museum 
and the Palace of the Senators, and near the Church of 
Ara Coeli ; and I like to think that at Epiphanytide, 
when, after the solemn procession of the children of S. 
Francis, the priest holds aloft the Bambino that He may 
bless the city, the blessing of the Babe lingers a little 
while on the figure of the grey, disillusioned emperor who 
rides, rides for ever on the Capitol, at the heart of ancient 
Rome. 



CHAPTER IV 

ROME UNDERGROUND 

IDONT believe it," said Dominic. 
We were standing in the dining-room that once 
belonged to John and Paul, clients of Constantia, the 
daughter of Constantine the Great. The two men, now 
known to Romans as San Giovanni 6 San Paolo, were 
beheaded under the Emperor Julian, and buried in their 
own house,^ which now lies under the Church of SS. 
Giovanni e Paolo, served by the Passionist fathers. One 
of the fathers, a dehghtful person, who spoke a little 
English with the quaintest Italian intonation, was showing 
us the treasures which the energy of Padre Germano has 
restored to us. 

Our guide had just told us, pointing to the frescoes : 
" They are pagan, before conversion." And Dominic 
whispered to me the retort I have already quoted. 

Well, it seems probable that some of the frescoes are of 
the second and third centuries — the authorities quarrel, 
as usual ; some say definitely that both the houses are 
fourth- century buildings. But leaving on one side the 
question of these frescoes, there is no doubt that in another 
room we have fourth-century frescoes of which some are 

^ This, of course, was very exceptional. It is particularly 
mentioned in the Sacramentary of S. Leo, where the Preface for 
these Saints' day runs : "Of Thy merciful providence Thou hast 
vouchsafed not only to crown the circuit of the City with the 
glorious passions of the martyrs, but also to hide in the very heart 
of the City itself the triumphant bodies of Saint John and Saint 
Paul." 

68 



ROME UNDERGROUND 69 

frankly " pagan '' while others represent Moses, and an 
Orante. 

What Dominic wished to protest against was the habit, 
almost universal in Rome, of ascribing to a purely pagan 
origin house decorations of a pagan character. It was 
evidently inconceivable to the Passionist father that 
John or Paul, after their conversion,^ would have had 
their ceiling decorated with Tritons and genii ; a line is 
drawn rigorously between Christian and pagan art. And 
this is done too by quite learned archaeologists, without, so 
far as I can discover, a shadow of evidence. Indeed what 
evidence we have all points the other way. It is certain 
that the early Christians, so far from objecting to pagan 
mythology wholesale, actually used it, at times, to illustrate 
Christianity. Even Brownlow and Northcote admit that 
Our Lord is represented in the guise of Orpheus ; there is 
reason to believe that He also figures as Hermes ; and we 
are not sure whether the frescoes that are said to have 
misled Raoul Rochette really came from a Gnostic 
cemetery. 

No one, of course, would argue that the Christian of 
early days was not extremely cautious as to how much of 
popular and pagan mythology could be safely admitted 
into Christian houses. A rigorous dismissal had to be 
made of all those frescoes which stood for lust and cruelty 
and pride and indifference and Fate. But the gentle gods 
of streams, and seas and trees; the beautiful figure of 
Orpheus who, in the process of years, had become semi- 
divine, and the office of Hermes all lend themselves, in a 
greater or less degree, to incorporation into Christianity. 

And there is another objection to the theory that the 
early Church made a clean sweep of all ** pagan " art, and 
bade the convert turn his back resolutely on the few 
gracious personages of his native mythology. If this 

^ There is no evidence, by the way, that these saints were^not 
brought up as Christians. 



70 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE 

theory were true, how can we explain the survival of such 
frescoes as those in the triclinium ? Even if they are 
second- century decorations, it would have been easy for 
John and Paul to obliterate them in the reign of Con- 
stantine. When we remember how the iconoclasts of 
later ages, of the eighth, of the sixteenth and seventeenth 
centuries treated an art of which it disapproved, we are 
surely justified in supposing that Puritans of the fourth 
century would have behaved very like Puritans of later 
times. 

It is true that individual persons, generally monks or 
hermits, did betray a great distrust of the use of art 
among Christians ; but this tendency to remove so 
enormous a part of life from the influence of the Church 
has always been an eccentric one, it has always failed 
before the bar of the universal Church. Nothing is more 
removed from the average character of the early Church 
than this Puritan ^ hatred of pictorial art. All the 

^ An effort has been made recently to roll away the reproach of 
distrust and hatred for art from the Puritans. The ingenious 
author makes a fair show by dint of including such men as Dante 
among the Puritans. W^hat particular corner in the Inferno the 
author of the Divina Commedia would assign him for this blas- 
phemy we need not stop to inquire. But it is a little futile for 
anyone in England to proclaim that Puritanism has not opposed 
art while we can still look on the shattered and plundered skeletons 
of our cathedrals ; when we can still see in S. Bavon at Ghent the 
candlesticks that Cromwell stole from S. Paul's, and — did not 
crush and destroy — but sold to the Flemings ; when we remember 
that three or four of the best European picture galleries started 
with a nucleus from the dispersed treasures of Charles I. ; and 
above all when we recall the terms of the Act of Parliament that 
sanctioned the dispersal and ordered the burning of all pictures 
containing a representation of the Second Person of the Trinity 
or of the Virgin Mary : but the Commonwealth preferred hard 
cash to even indulgence in religious bigotry, and most of 
Charles' pictures, sacred and secular, were sold ; and the paltry 
;^ii8,o8o, IDS. 2d. gained by the sale is the best answer to those 
who would profess that Puritanism fostered the arts. 



ROME UNDERGROUND 71 

remains of primitive Christianity in Rome testify to a 
love for decorative art, and show how quickly and defin- 
itely the Church shook off the influence of Judaism in this 
matter. 

And if further evidence be needed that the early Chris- 
tians did not shrink from putting together what we now 
call '* secular " and " sacred " subjects it may be foimd 
in another room of the house, where the Good Shepherd 
stands between the sheep and the goats, and above them, 
in the vaulting, are the joyous, fanciful creatures of 
pagan folklore. 

In another room occurs a fresco, probably of the ninth 
century, representing the Crucifixion. As is usual in 
early crucifixes. Our Lord wears the royal robe ; His 
figure is resting on the cross — and there is no attempt at 
the realism which marks later representations of the 
Crucified. The fresco is not otherwise noteworthy, but 
its mention raises a question which puzzles most Catholics 
in Rome : How is it that the early Church, so far as we 
know, did not use the crucifix ? The earliest crucifix in 
Rome is probably that on the great door of Santa Sabina, 
which is said to have been carved in the fifth century. 
We look in vain in the Catacombs, in vain among the early 
sarcophagi for what has become to us the most natural 
memorial of the availing Passion. Christ in the arms of 
Mary, Christ as the Good Shepherd, Christ at Cana in 
Galilee, Christ and the Wise Men, are all found in third- or 
even second-century frescoes. The cross, in many forms, 
is also found, but in later inscriptions and pictures.^ 

There is a fairly general agreement among scholars as 
to one of the reasons why we do not get the crucifix in 
early art. Crucifixion was still a method of execution 
among the Romans, and the early Church shrank from a 

1 If we accept the arguments of Mgr. Wilpert, the earhest cross 
is probably that on the grave of Bictoria in the Domitilla Cata- 
comb. 



72 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE 

representation of Our Lord which might lead to blasphemy 
from the pagans among whom they Hved. 

There is, I think, another and deeper reason, and we 
can reach it by considering that not only is the Crucifixion 
absent from early art, but that we have no pictures which 
show Our Lord in agony or sorrow. All the early repre- 
sentations of Christ are joyful, sunny and light-hearted ; 
and the beautiful figure of the Good Shepherd, beardless 
and youthful, makes not the slightest attempt at reahsm. 

Why is this ? 

There are two reasons. Firstly, the early Church was 
so close to Calvary that she needed no reminder of the 
great Act of Atonement. The Blood of the Passion was 
no mere metaphor for the Christian of the first and second 
centuries ; Polycarp, Bishop of Smyrna, had sat at the 
feet of John, who had stood, with the Holy Mother, at 
the foot of the Cross and seen the piercing of the Sacred 
Heart. We can fancy those first followers of the Cross 
listening in a hushed and sacred silence to the story of 
Calvary told them by one who himself was so near to the 
Divine Wounds. And when they spoke of the Crucifixion, 
we may be sure that they did so with a reserve and a 
reverence that we might well imitate. Just as they 
signed themselves many times in the day with the sacred 
sign, so in their hearts they bore the Crucified. 

Then think of the lives of the early Roman Christians. 
They were joyful, aggressively joyful, to judge from the 
Acta Martymm ; but they lived in the midst of dangers, 
in daily expectation, in hourly defiance of the most hideous 
tortures. They had no need of any pictorial or sculptural 
recollection of the Passion of their Master : they had 
illustrations of the Passion recounted again and again in 
the deaths of their friends and their relatives. Every 
Christian was a crucifix. Every Christian walked under 
the visible shadow of Calvary, trod perpetually the vVay 
of Sorrows, was in immediate preparation for the vinegar 



ROME UNDERGROUND 73 

and gall. So when they turn and try to represent some 
of the mysteries of their faith in painting they paint 
joyful things, symbols and incidents to remind them of 
their eternal home, the home not made with hands, and 
to recall to their hearts that they served a Master whose 
yoke was easy and whose burden was light. 

It was not until later ^ that the Church, now established 
and respectable and feared, no longer expectant of the 
imminent end of the world, no longer walking in tremulous 
happiness between the Garden of Gethsemane and the hill 
of Golgotha, needed to be reminded of the bitter agony 
that had gone to purchase her from the world. The 
martyr with his unflinching courage, his naif insolence, 
his indomitable hope, bad become '* canonized," smothered 
over by attributes of conventional sanctity. No longer did 
the Holy Father flee from house to tomb, from tomb to 
the Via Appia, and from the Domine Quo Vadis back to 
his sheep and to death ; and so, in her wisdom, the Church 
decides that from henceforth the crucifix is to be universal 
— and not the triumphant crucifix, which represents a 
king on the cross, and crowns Him with roses rather than 
with thorns — not the symbolic crucifix, with the Lamb, 
as it had been slain, against the Wood of the Tree — 
but the Man of Sorrows nailed on the Rood of Time, 
the Rejected of Israel murdered by the hands of 
the Jews, Jesus of Nazareth hanging on the Roman 
gallows. 

A wise man will not lament this inevitable transition. 
There is room in Christian art for the Good Shepherd, the 
Christ in Glory, and the Christ on the cross, just as there 
is room in Christian theology for the Incarnation, the 
Ascension and the Atonement ; one age or one tempera- 
ment may lay greater stress on one aspect of Christian 
truth : but what matters is that we should not blame 
those whose theological training or devotion leads them 

^ A.D. 692. 



74 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE 

to emphasize different truths from those which we our- 
selves particularly value. 

In the church above the house of SS. Giovanni e Paolo I 
received one of the best lessons I have ever had against 
hasty criticism. After our guide had showed us the 
houses, he came back into the church with us, and then 
said : 

" You would like to see San Paolo ? Ye-e-es ? " 

I am not over-critical of rehcs, but I was surprised at 
this offer to show the body of a fourth- century martyr. I 
knew the bodies of both San Giovanni and San Paolo had 
been removed from the house to the church ; but I had 
not heard that the relics were shown. 

We consented naturally, and were led to a gorgeous 
side chapel. 

The father left us kneeling at the foot-pace and went up 
to the altar. A sort of screen was rolled aside from the 
front of the altar, and there, behind glass, lay the figure of 
a man who did not look as though he had been dead much 
more than a day or two. 

I gasped, and looked at Dominic ; then we thanked our 
guide, and went out. 

" Well, Dominic, they really ought to prevent that good 
man showing that body as San Paolo's : it's absurd. 
Why, there's nothing left of San Francesca but her 
skeleton — and a man who was executed under Julian ! 
Really, I never expected to have Protestantism so roused 
in me." 

" Are you sure it was San Paolo ? " 

** He said it was. You heard him. I don't know how 
they know it isn't San Giovanni. Besides, he said 
' Padrone ' ; I'm sure he did. Oh, he meant it for San 
Paolo." 

" Yes — but mayn't there be another San Paolo ? I 
mean " 



ROME UNDERGROUND 75 

" My dear Dominic, we have only just disentangled this 
Paolo from the apostle. It's not likely there would be a 
third of the name : at least, he wouldn't have the same 
church." 

" Well — but aren't they Passionists at that church ? " 

*' Yes — what's that got to do with it ? " 

" Oh ! I expect you know ; but I thought perhaps that 
the Passionists had a founder or something — mightn't 
you call a founder ' Padrone ' ? And wasn't he — mightn't 
he — have been called * Paul.' " 

My jaw dropped. Of course Dominic was right ; he 
always is when he ends an argument by saying, " I expect 
you know." The body we were shown was that of S. 
Paolo della Croce, who died in 1775 and was canonized in 
1867. 

" Do you know," I said, " I feel I ought to go and 
apologize to that good father." 

" Oh ! I don't think you need do that ; after all, you 
didn't behave hke a sceptic." 

The house of San Giovanni e San Paolo is underground, 
because of that alteration of the levels which is so marked 
a feature of Rome. That other imderground Rome, so 
enormously impressive in its range, has of course been 
underground from the days when the Christians and the 
Jews dug out in the tufa burying-places for their dead. 

I love the way in which cities are guarded by the 
departed. Even our modem cities, even London, are 
shielded by a ring of cemeteries, cemeteries that we pass 
through whenever we go out of London : but nowhere is 
the guardianship of the dead so much in evidence as in 
Rome. The very number of the buried astonishes one. 
Whether or no the calculation that gives the Catacombs 
over three milHon graves be right or not, there is no doubt 
that the mind and imagination are stunned by the sight 
of those quiet, regular receptacles. It is true that to-day 



76 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE 

but few of the bodies are left where they were. The Chris- 
tians of a later age, in their passion for relics, stormed the 
Catacombs and filled the churches. That was a great day 
when the dead, despised Christians, those whom the world 
had rejected, came back to take possession of the most 
holy places of the imperial city. There was a day — some 
authorities say under Boniface IV., others under Gre- 
gory IV. — when there came in solemn procession from the 
walls of the city thirty-eight waggons. They were escorted 
with lights and incense, with the magnificence that 
Christian love has always paid to the bodies of loved ones ; 
singing the Litany the clerics preceded the waggons, and 
halted at last in front of the great temple that was called 
All-Holy. And then the contents of the waggons — bones 
of the Christians buried in the Catacombs — were cere- 
monially taken into the Pantheon, and the Pope solemnly 
rededicated the building to the worship of God, and called 
it S. Mary of the Martyrs. So the dead took possession 
of the Pantheon. And the same thing happened in a 
lesser scale in many other churches ; it was felt that 
those who had gone before must share in the life of the 
present, and that those who were still in the body could 
not afford to lose the shadow of the sanctity of the 
departed. 

And we must remember that this feeling was very real 
and sincere. No one can read the inscriptions in the 
Catacombs without feeling that these men did really 
beUeve their Lord's saying : " He that believeth on Me 
shall never die." Their dead are all sleeping ; they ask 
their dead to speak to Jesus about them, left behind, 
sorrowful in their joy, joyful in their sorrow. The whole 
place, the whole religion is redolent of that family feeling 
which, as we have seen, marks the Liturgy, and which was 
the keynote of that Christian community. 

Learned men — Catholics and Protestants — ^go down now 
and read over the pathetic, sublime little notices, and argue 




THE PANTHEON 



ROME UNDERGROUND 77 

gravely about " Prayers for the Departed — are they 
legitimate ? " ** Invocation — is any instance of it found 
in the Catacombs ? " Good God ! there were no dead 
to these men ; the tombs are full of that sweet chatter 
which man must indulge in when he parts from what he 
loves. Chatter meaningless and full of meaning, talk for 
the sake of talk and for the relief of one's soul; words 
that seem to express little and yet bear the burden of life 
and death in their syllables. Invocation ! The broken 
accents of a weeping mother saying, ** Do talk to Jesus 
about me ; ask him to comfort me. I shall be so lonely 
without you " — that's all, and surely no one can but feel 
the beauty and the sorrow and the deep truth of it. 

'* Yes ; but, after all, the question remains " said 

Dominic. 

" Oh ! I know it does ; and you know the answer to it. 
What we want to discover is that first flush of Christian 
love, that first glory of Christian hope, that first splendour 
of faith. When we pray for the dead as for the living, when 
we go to Mary as we go to our mother, and are at home in 
the Holy Family, then we shall understand that no one 
can help taking into his confidence those who are God's 
saints, that one must try and keep in one's heart the names 
of those who are dear to the heart of Jesus." 

" You mean you're a pragmatist ? " 

*' Perhaps I do ; but I know you agree with me that the 
only way really to test the use of * Invocation ' is to try 
it ; and as for prayers for the dead — did any Christian 
not yet pray for his beloved as he knelt by the clay that 
the spirit had just left ? And what we do by the deathbed 
is what we should do always." 

It is often difficult to decide what is cause and what is 
effect, and I would not be positive as to whether the 
neglect of the Catacombs caused the neglect of religion in 
Rome, or whether the indifference to religion made men 
forget the great sepulchres of their brethren; but the 



78 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE 

fact remains that between the ninth and the fifteenth 
centuries the Catacombs were neglected. And then, in 
the dawn of the Renascence, Rome turned again to the 
great caverns of the dead that guard her fame. 

In an excellent little guide-book to Italy, anonymous 
and undated, but written some time during the reign of 
Cardinal Ferdinando de Medicis, Duke of Florence from 
1587 to 1609, is one of the earliest English references that 
I know to the Catacombs. 

" S. Sebastian's," says the author, " stands on the 
wayside without Rome, called Appia ; . . . and hard 
by a Place called Catatunibae is a Well wherein did 
lie secretly hid the Bodies of S. Peter and Paul, as they 
say, two hundred and fifty years before any Body could 
know what was become of them ; on the same is built 
an Altar with especial privileges, at which Intercession 
is made for the afflicted Souls that, as j^et, are detained 
in Purgatory. 

" Then desire a priest to go with you that hath a Torch 
lighted, lest you lose yourselves in the Grotto or Vault, 
under which Hes buried Calixtus with one hundred 
eighty-six thousands Martyrs." 

The author of the guide goes no further ; but a 
much fuller account was written by another Enghshman, 
an enemy of the Catholic Church. Anthony Munday, 
an indifferent Elizabethan playwright, pubhshed in 1590 
a pamphlet called '* The English Romayne Life." It 
was an account of the Hves of the students (Munday 
had been one of them) at the English College, and he 
narrates by the way various details of what he has 
seen, saying in his own brisk style : 

'* And now, seeing I am among the Pope's Pageants, I 
will blaze a little more of his holy Hell." And he gives a 
very good account and, barring his prejudices, which are 
bitter and unscrupulous, an accurate one of how the Cata- 
combs were visited in 158 1. 



ROME UNDERGROUND 79 

It was on 31st May 1578 that some workmen were 
digging pozzolana from a vineyard near the Via Salaria. 
They suddenly shpped into an ancient cemetery, where 
they found painting and sarcophagi. Thus were the 
Catacombs rediscovered. Rome and the churches all 
over Europe were still staggering under the blows given 
by Luther, by Calvin, by Cranmer, and most of all by the 
faithlessness and wanton indifference of those who were 
the guardians of the Church of God. Ignatius, surnamed 
Loyola, who, with S. Teresa, did most for the Catholic 
revival, had been dead twenty-two years ; and now new 
allies were brought in to quicken devotion and inspire 
faith. We can only lament that the arrival of this 
reinforcement did not ensure methods of peace : but by 
now the spirit of schism had spread like a plague through 
Christian Europe. Men were more eager for victory than 
for truth ; fought more vigorously for party than for the 
Church ; were appetent of all that was novel, and con- 
temptuous of all that was old. The day of compromise 
was over. Erasmus was dead, More was dead, and not 
all the zeal of S. Ignatius, not all the love of S. Philip, 
could achieve what might have been won by the sweet 
sanity of the Catholic humanists. 

Still zeal and love were kindled anew at the Catacombs. 
It was there that those brave Jesuit missionaries, saints 
like Campion, caught the courage that was afterwards 
tested at Tyburn ; it was there that Southwell learnt how 
to sing of the love of God, and how to die for the faith ; 
and it was there that Anthony Munday, sedulous spy on 
his fellow-countrymen — well, here is what Munday wrote 
about the Vautes which, in all good faith, the priests and 
scholars of the English College showed him : 

" Among a number of theyr Inventions to uphold and 
maintaine their wicked Dealinges, they have certaine 
Vautes underneath the Ground, wherein they say howe, 
in the Time that the persecuting Emperors lived in Rome, 



8o A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE 

the Christians were glad to hide themselves, and there 
they lived many yeeres, having no Foode nor Nourishment 
to maintaine them, but onlie that they were fed by Angels. 
... At a church there called Saint Pancratia ^ there is a 
Vaute, wherein I have gone with the Jesuites of the English 
Colledge and the Students ; and there they have shewed 
me in divers Places, made on either Side in the Vaute as we 
go, that there lay such a Saint, and there lay such an other ; 
then they were buried, and none was there but they were 
all Saints. Then (having every one of us a waxe Light in 
our Hands, because it is impossible to see any Light in the 
Vaute and for those Lights the Fryers, that keepe the 
Church, must have Money, which we put into a Basen that 
standeth at the Going downe into the Vaute) they looke on 
the Grounde under theyr Feete as they goe ; and, if they 
chaunce to find a Bone (as some sure are thrown in of 
Purpose to deceive the People) whether it be of a Dog, a 
Hog, or Sheepe, or any Beast, they can presently tell what 
Saint's Bone it was, either Saint Fraunces, Saint Anthonie, 
Sainte Blaise, or some other saint that pleaseth them to 
name : Then must no Bodie touch it without he be a 
Priest, or it must be brought home for an especiall Relique ; 
and thus (saving your Reverence) encreaseth the Genelogie 
of the holy Reliques in Rome. . . . Without Rome, about 
the Distaunce of half a Mile from the Cittie, there is a huge 
great Vaute, which they call S. Priscillaes Grote ; and 
within this Vaute there is a great many of severall Places, 
turning one this way, another that way, as, in one street, 
there may be divers Streetes and Lanes turning every way ; 
so that, when they goe into this Vaute, they tye the End of 
a Line at the Going in, and so goe on by the Line, else they 
might chaunce to loose themselves, and so misse of their 
Coming out again : or else, if they have not a Line, they 
take Chalk with them, and make Figures at every Turning, 
that, at their Commin again (being guided by Torch Light, 
^ Evidently San Pancrazio is meant. 



ROME UNDERGROUND 8i 

for Candles will go out with the Dampe in the Vaute) they 
make Accompt, tyll they get foorth ; but this is not so 
ready a Way, as by the Line. . . . One of the Priestes, two 
of the Schollers and I toke with us a Line, and two or 
three great Lightes, and so went to this aforesayde Vaute : 
We going along, in farther and farther, there we sawe 
certaine Places, one above another, three and three on 
either side, during a great Way in Length ; and these 
Places, they sayde, to be some of them Graves of persecuted 
Saintes and Martirs, when they hid themselves in the Time 
of the cruell Emperors of Rome, and there they died. 

*' Proceeding on forwarde, wee came to an olde Thinge 
like an Aultar, whereon in olde and auncient Painting,^ 
which was then almost clean wome out, was Christ upon 
the Crosse, and our Lady, and S. John by him ; there 
the Priest sayde, S. Peter, S. Paule, and many other 
Saintes had sayde Masses to the Christians that hid them- 
selves there." ^ 

Dominic and I chose to go to the Catacombs of Domi- 
tilla rather than to those of Callixtus, mainly on account of 
the freshness of the frescoes in the former cemetery, and 
partly because we both felt that it was a journey — this 
visit to the old home of the dead — to be done as quietly 
as possible. As it happened we had the Catacombs to 
ourselves, and the guide was one of those excellent men 
who left one to one's owai reflections, while h'^ was careful 

^ If this was a fresco of the same date as most of the decorations 
in the Catacombs of S. Priscilla, it would be easily the oldest 
Rood in the world. But I can trace no other reference to the 
" painting " in ancient or modern literature on the Catacombs; 
If it was really a representation of the Crucifixion, it was probably 
a fresco added in the sixth or eighth century. 

« '* The Enghsh Romayne Life ; etc. Written by A. M. Some- 
time the Pope's Scholar in the Seminarie among them. Imprinted 
at London by John Charlewoode, for Nicholas Ling, dwelling in 
Paules Church-yarde, Anno 1590." 
F 



82 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE 

to show us everything, and to explain all that needed 
explaining. 

No one who has undergone the experience of walking 
along those apparently interminable corridors, with their 
serried rows of graves, with the little bottles for wine, and 
the lamps for oil, can ever forget it. It gives one a proper 
sense of the position of the living, this great city of the 
departed. We talk and quarrel over rights and duties : 
these, too, have their rights, this great silent proletariat, 
so far outweighing us in numbers and wisdom and influence. 
The cemetery seemed to me to be instinct with life. We 
stood and gazed at that fresco where Petronilla the 
Martyr welcomes Veneranda to paradise ; we felt that 
the man who drew it knew that these two were occupied 
with the real business of hfe. And then you can find here 
two of the most poignantly attractive pictures of the Good 
Shepherd — one sheep clasped over His shoulders, the other 
round His feet ; and here too some artist of the third 
century painted Mary and the Child Jesus, and on either 
side two men, bearing gifts — the Magi— so they say, with 
their symbolic offerings. The only thing that speaks of 
death is the bas-relief on a column, that shows the martyr- 
dom of S. Nereus and S. Achilleas. Yet here there is no 
thought of realism : over the heads of the martyrs the 
sculptor has put the laurel crowns of victory. 

And amid the scenes of Christian life we find one of the 
earliest renderings of a legend that Christianity could not 
lose. The burial-place of the Flavian family — to which 
S. Petronilla probably belonged — consists of a corridor 
and two small rooms. In the corridor are frescoes of 
Noah and Daniel; but one of the rooms is given up to 
pictures, pretty, childlike pictures of Psyche and Eros. 
Psyche, in her green frock, and with butterfly wings, is 
picking flowers ; Eros pours fruit into a basket. So the 
soul of man wanders, gaily, after the flowers ; and the 
Divine Lover brings to her what he alone has, the real 



ROME UNDERGROUND 83 

fruit of Faith, grapes from the Living Vine, the golden 
apples of the Hesperides of God. 

The seven great churches of Rome to which in particular 
pilgrimage has always been made are : S. Pietro in 
Vaticano, S. Paolo fuori Muri, S. Giovanni in Laterano, 
S. Lorenzo, S. Sebastiano, S. Croce in Gerusalemme, and 
S. Maria Maggiore. 

Of these S. Sebastiano has the most intimate connexion 
with the early history of Christian Rome. Not only is it 
the memorial of the martyr, that Christian soldier who has 
in later times become a kind of Apollo ; but it was for a 
time the resting-place of the bodies of the Holy Apostles, 
Peter and Paul. 

During the persecution of Valerian, in 257, the bodies of 
the two great patrons of Rome were taken from their 
tombs on the Via Cornelia and the Via Ostiensis and hidden 
in a crypt off the Via Appia. When Sebastian, after 
recovering from the torture of the arrows, was stoned to 
death by the order of Diocletian, his relatives and friends 
took his body and buried it, as he had desired, " ad cata- 
cumbas : apud vestigia apostolorum." In later years 
the crypt near the church, built by Constantine, over the 
m.artyr's body, became known as the Coemeterium ad 
Catacumbas. To it devout people went, partly, no doubt, 
because it is easy of access ; partly for the memory of the 
Apostles ; and partly for the sake of the other great saints 
who were buried there. The place became known collo- 
quially as " The Catacomb" ; and this name extended itself 
to the other subterranean cemeteries which surround Rome. 

To-day one can go down and see the place where the 
bodies lay, according to an itinerary of 625, for forty years. 
The place where the Apostles' bodies were brought is at 
the back of the High Altar. It is a curiously shaped room, 
half underground ; and under the altar is the chamber, 
lined with marble, where the bodies were hidden ; there 



84 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE 

are also paintings here which Lanciani ascribes to the time 
of Damasus, who was Pope from 366 to 384. Other archae- 
ologists say that the chamber is the tomb of Quirinus, 
Bishop of Siscia (Sissek, in Croatia) , who was martyred in 304. 
Whatever be the truth about this, it was here that 
Damasus caused an inscription to be put up, recording the 
fact that the bodies of the Apostles had lain here : 

** Hie habitasse prius Sanctos cognoscere debes, 
Nomina quisque Petri pariter Paulique requiris. 
Discipulos Oriens misit, quod sponte fatemur, 
Sangiiinis ob meritum Christumque per astra secuti, 
Aetherios petiere sinus et regna piorum. 
Roma suos potius meruit defendere cives, 
Haec Damasus vestras referat nova sidera laudes." ' 

A rather sceptical friend, an archaeologist, had asked 
where we were going on the day that we set out for S. 
Sebastiano. When we told him " Ah ! " he said, " don't 
forget to go to the Platonia : there at any rate it is certain 
— as certain as anything can be — the bodies of S. Peter 
and S. Paul did lie." 

His scepticism about most of the relics and memories 
of Christian Rome had somewhat annoyed us ; he seemed 
at times to be kin to that Bollandist of whom it is said : 

" Pere has destroyed more saints than the Holy 

Father ever made " ; but one should not, I suppose, do 
anything to lessen the healthy critical atmosphere of the 

* The odd reference to the East is probably a discreet reminder 
that, after the death of the Apostle, certain Christians attempted 
to carry back their rehcs to the home of their birth. It was during 
this attempt that the bodies were first placed here ; they were 
then buried in tombs near the actual place of martyrdom. Then 
they were again brought to the Platonia in 275 (or 258, according 
to Mgr. Barnes) ; and then were restored to their respective 
basihcas under Pope Marcellus about 307. A great deal of 
suggestive writing, perhaps shghtly too confident in tone, on this 
question will be found in Mgr. Barnes*' ** St Peter in Rome, and his 
tomb on the Vatican Hill." 



ROME UNDERGROUND 85 

Roman archaeological schools. Nothing was more sur- 
prising to me than to find that scholars of all creeds, or 
none, were busily engaged in confirming many of the most 
cherished legends of the Church. A ruthless and even 
extravagantly destructive criticism is, almost with reluc- 
tance, compelled to acknowledge the essential truthfulness 
of most of the early stories of the Roman martyrs. 

And so touched is one by the spirit of the age that this 
discovery made me happier in paying my visit to the altar 
in the crypt of S. Peter's, which is as close as one can get 
to the tomb, sealed with the great gold cross of Constantine, 
that contains the relics of the Prince of the Apostles. 

Dominic and I were rather upset when we heard that it 
was not altogether easy to visit the Sagre Grotte. We 
had set our hearts on going to see the splendid ruins of 
old S. Peter's, the tombs of the Popes — above all the place 
below the Confessio in the great Basilica. And go we did ; 
but by a kind of accident. 

A Roman priest — I must not put his name here, but I 
have mentioned him before apropos of Modernism — of 
whom we were seeing a good deal, and who was always 
most kind to us, said he would see what he could do. 

He met us one morning in the cathedral, and hurried 
us into the sacristy ; there we were introduced to a friend 
of his, a canon of the cathedral, who was, he said, only too 
charmed to have the opportunity of showing us the crypt. 

" Could we go now ? " queried Dominic. 

" Well — now — no, it is too late " — with a delightful 
smile ; *' but on Thursday, yes ? At ten- thirty ? " 

So, having made our engagement, we thanked him, and 
our friend, who beamed during the conversation, and went 
our way. 

On Thursday we arrived, and went to the pillar where is 
the little-noticed entrance to the Sagre Grotte Vaticane. 

We were a little early. 



86 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE 

So we waited patiently : ten-thirty, no canon ; ten- 
forty, no canon. It began to look serious. 

" Let us go to the sacristy," said Dominic. So there we 
went, and found it, as before, very full of very busy people, 
who didn't seem to mind in the least what happened to us. 
Priests were vesting and unvesting ; servers running about 
— but never a sign of the canon we wanted. We came back 
into the church, and wandered back again to the statue 
of S. Veronica. When we got there we found two ladies 
waiting. 

" Excuse me, but are you going to the crypt ? " 

" We are — our guide has just gone — but will be back in 
a moment." 

'* Is he Canon ? " 

"No; I'm afraid " 

At this point their guide appeared. He was not our 
canon, and, with scarcely a glance at us, gathered up his 
flock of two, and went to the door. 

But this was more than we could bear. 

Politely, but urgently and firmly, I attacked him. 
Couldn't he let us go with him ? Somehow our friend. 

Canon , had missed us. Or we had mistaken the 

day. He was sorry ; but it was impossible, unless we had 
an order. We had an order ? " No." Then he mustn't 
risk it. ** Oh ! but you understand, we were going to go 
to-day." And then I named my other friend, who had 
introduced us to the canon. 

He wavered — ^but then shrugged his shoulders and pro- 
ceeded to the door again. 

We were desperate. I suddenly remembered that our 
friend Padre Benedict had been secretary to one of the 
most important of the cardinals. 

I named the cardinal. I don't know what I said about 
him ; but it was sufficient. With a smile and a beckoning 
hand the guide bade us come after him, and we went down 
to the level of the old church. 



ROME UNDERGROUND 87 

The authorities have had the sense and the good taste 
to light the crypt with electricity ; so the art treasures 
there are no longer stained and blackened with the smoke 
of many tapers. 

We went round slowly, listening to the canon (for this 
guide was a canon as well, we discovered). It was difficult 
not to linger over the exquisite fragments by Mino da 
Fiesole and Donatello, the sculptors who are the spring 
and summer of Italian sculpture. There is a wonderful 
angel by Mino, with a charm and gracefulness that makes 
the marble tremble with beauty. Then there are the 
entrancing reliefs from the tomb of Paul II. Then we 
went past tomb after tomb of the Popes ; one especially 
we noticed, that of Adrian IV., a great granite sepulchre, 
severe and cold. The canon talked a good deal about 
most of the tombs, until he came to one at the end of a 
transept. " Whose is that ? " I asked. He glanced. 
" That — Alexander VI. — Borgia." From his tone the 
speaker might have been an Orsini. 

Then quite suddenly, or so it seemed, the electric lights 
glowed, not on dim, cold tombs, nor on the half -seen out- 
lines of ancient sculpture, but on a gorgeous chapel of 
gold and jewels. We were at the altar where priests, 
who are privileged to do so, may say Mass " over the 
body of S. Peter." We were just under the Confessio ; 
and between the High Altar and the Altar of the Crypt, 
if we accept Mgr. Barnes' arguments, is the body of 
S. Peter. 

It was impossible for me, as I knelt there, not to go back 
in thought to the moment in the life of Jesus when Peter 
burst out into his confession, " Thou art the Christ." If 
the great Basilica and the High Altar therein commemorate 
the promise of Our Lord to S. Peter, that he is the Rock of 
the Church, the quieter, less frequented space beneath 
the Confessio is the eternal shrine of Peter's assured 
declaration. Up above we come humbly to the Prince 



88 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE 

of the Apostles ; down here we can approach the Fisher- 
man, trusting in the common love for the common Master, 
remembering his vision of the great sheet, and confident 
of our reception. 

Up above S. Peter is holding his public receptions ; 
down here he still gives his private audiences, and his 
message for us is the same as was his message for the 
people of Jerusalem : " Therefore let all the house of 
Israel know assuredly that God hath made that same Jesus, 
whom ye have crucified, both Lord and Christ." . . . 
" The promise is unto you, and to your children, and to all 
that are afar off, even as many as the Lord our God shall 
caU." 



CHAPTER V 

ROME AT CHURCH 

" A/'OU must not spit," " Spitting is forbidden," and 

X " You are requested not to spit " — notices such as 
these, to be found now in most of the Roman churches, 
remind the pilgrim that he has come to a strange country. 
We talked the matter over with Dom Benedict : he was 
apologetic, in both senses of the word. 

" Yes — it is nasty : but it is of a necessity, is it not ? 
All thees is a matter of 'abit — national 'abit. In England 
— well, do you not blow your nose at Mass in England ? 
Even if you are saying Mass " — this with a startling 
directness to Dominic, who was forced to admit that the 
handkerchief was used. He wanted to go on arguing that 
the use of the handkerchief made all the difference — but 
Dom Benedict was too quick for him. 

" We have sand — and it is swep' out ; and we have the 
notices, and people do not do it so much. No. And we 
who are priests hardly ever now — I would never spit in 
church." 

There is, I suppose, something in his standpoint ; but 
prejudice was too strong for me — not that my senses were 
often offended. The notices have had a great effect, and 
one was only troubled seriously in great miscellaneous 
crowds in poor churches, or by some of the scholars of the 
great colleges, of whom the worst were, not the Romans, 
but the Germans. 

Apart from that one question, we never felt otherwise 
than at home in the churches and at the services in Rome 
89 



90 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE 

— except, of course, at the Uniate Epiphany Masses ; those, 
however, must wait their turn ; my present purpose is to 
give some idea how the Roman Liturgy is performed in 
the city of its birth. 

Our experience was that in Rome you can find almost 
every type of service, every degree of reverence, and every 
variety of music. The best ? — well, the best to my mind 
is the High Mass at the great Benedictine Church of San 
Anselmo. 

When one English friend, hearing that we only had three 
Sundays in Rome, urged us to spend at least one Sunday 
morning at San Anselmo, we were a little doubtful. The 
church is modern, we thought, and has not half the interest 
of other Roman churches ; and when in Rome we dis- 
covered that the High Mass was at nine o'clock, and that 
the church was on the Aventine, nearly half-an-hour from 
our hotel in the Via Tritone, we were even more doubtful. 

We mentioned our doubts to a friend whose acquaint- 
ance we made in Rome, who happened to be one of the 
greatest living authorities on plain-song. Our doubts 
were soon scattered. 

** Not go to San Anselmo ! Of course you must go. It 
is the only church in Rome where anyone who loves music 
can worship without being sick. Good as Solesmes ? 
Better — that's the advantage of plain-song, when you've 
once got a large body of men to sing it, they go on improv- 
ing. Early ? Mass is at the canonical hour — and a 
good job. They don't want tourists. Of course, if you've 
only come over to sight-see, and don't care about hearing 
a decently sung Mass — don't go ! " And with a shrug, he 
turned, and left us decided. 

The Church of San Anselmo, whose monastery is now 
the chief house of the great Benedictine Order, stands on 
the Aventine in one of the most charming situations in 
Rome. The churches — upper and lower— will compare 
for dignity of effect and severity of motive with any 



ROME AT CHURCH 91 

modern church in Europe ; and the fact that their archi- 
tect was the Lord Abbot Hildebrand de Hemptinne, 
Primate of the Benedictine Order, shows how the most 
ancient order of rehgious conserves its reputation for 
soundness in art and workmanship. 

The upper church, in which we heard Mass, is perfectly 
plain, contains only two altars, one picture over the Lady 
Altar, and one image over the High Altar. One felt 
curiously at home in the church ; the whole impression 
was non-Italian. 

When we arrived the monks had not yet come, but they 
arrived in a minute or two, about three hundred of them, 
and sat in open stalls with their hoods over their heads 
waiting for Terce to begin. 

What is there about plain-song that charms even the 
unlearned in music ? I have no knowledge of and little 
taste for a great deal of modern music. To hear a Credo 
sung by a magnificent choir, and with orchestral accom- 
paniments, with all the artificiality of repetitions and 
false emphases and solos and emotional passages of singular 
fioridity, is for me a trial that experience makes little 
easier. Even a Mass of Mozart's, with its quaint sugges- 
tions of a dance, some old-fashioned, sedate, decorous 
dance, yet, for all its formality, full of a certain restrained 
passion, is for me too individual, too personal a music. 
And Palestrina ? — well. Palest rina is the one composer 
who not only respected and understood plain-song, but, in 
his efforts to surpass it, knew on what lines alone success 
might have been achieved : that he did not achieve 
success is only to say that success is not possible. 

Plain-song, for all sacred things, is incomparable : and for 
a very simple reason. Plain-song has grown up alongside 
the rites and the ceremonies of Holy Church : it is the 
living expression, in music, of that which is expressed also 
in the language of the Divine Office and the Missal, and 



92 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE 

in the ceremonies that have gradually become attached 
to the rites. Plain-song is not separable from the glorious 
actions of praise, prayer and devotion which it accom- 
panies ; plain-song is not so much subordinated to the 
words and ceremonies, as indistinguishably interwoven 
with them. For a man who has once heard plain-song 
properly sung it haunts for ever after the rites with which 
he first heard it associated. It is the soul of music — music 
in religion. That last is why plain-song so frequently 
fails when introduced into village choirs ; it is just as easy 
to sing plain-song as it is to pray properly — and no Christian 
who has tried will fail to acknowledge that prayer is the 
hardest of Christian duties. And if prayer be hard, the 
regular recitation of the Divine Ofhce, the perpetual repeti- 
tions of the Mass, with its suitable music, is almost impos- 
sible save for those who have devoted their whole lives to 
that divine energy which creates and directs so much of the 
world's happiness. The home of plain-song is the convent — 
and of all convents that of San Anselmo shows it at its best. 
With the first words of the Gloria in Excelsis we knew 
that we had nothing less than the voice of the Soul of the 
Church praising the Eternal Trinity. Like some quiet, 
immense, unescapable ocean the music flooded through 
the church, throbbing with the ebb and flow, secure, 
majestic, divine. And all through that Mass I had the 
feeling, which one has so rarely in church, that we were 
not only assisting at a divine mystery, not only at a human 
expression of love, but that we were the guardians, the 
sharers, the creatures of some enormous natural process, 
some potent and availing act, of which the Mass was the 
symbol. One's mind and heart were carried back not only 
to the upper room at Jerusalem, when the Lord Jesus and 
his Apostles sang the Hallel, not only to the Mount of the 
Crucifixion, to the broken Tomb, and the Hill of the 
Ascension, not only to the Heavenly Session and the 
Eternal Presentation of the Sacrifice and the Spilt Blood 



ROME AT CHURCH 93 

— but back, far back, into the counsels of God, into the 
very mind and being of the Creator, the Saviour, the 
Inspirer, carried back until one was dizzy with a faint 
revelation of what the Sacraments signified, and knew with 
a certain and blinding knowledge that all Acts of Love 
were sacramental, and that the Mass, which was the 
summary of all, was also the pattern of all. Then, as the 
music of the Agnus died away in the roof, I repeated 
" Agnus Dei, qui toUis peccata mundi " — mundi, not 
terrae, koctjulov not yrjg : it is that which divides Chris- 
tianity from all else, that vivid truth that God died for 
the sins of the whole universe, that if this planet was the 
scene of His human life, all the whole cosmic scheme 
comes within reach of the Outpoured Blood, and the 
wonders of the Unflagging Love, that at the centre of 
the world beats the Sacred Heart of Jesus. 

The Church of San Andrea della Valle is not beautiful. 
It was built in 1591 on the site of at least two earlier 
churches, and has always been in the hands of the 
Theatines, an order which shares with the Company of 
Jesus an unenviable reputation for florid art and bastard 
ornament. Of details of interest the church possesses a 
few : there is the tomb of JEnesiS Sylvius Piccolomini, 
immortalized elsewhere by Pinturicchio, and in the dome 
are frescoes by Domenichino, which are keenly representa- 
tive of that rhetorical and vigorous painter. In this 
church, however, occurs every year one of the most remark- 
able ceremonies in Rome. Those who know anything of 
the ways of the Western Church are aware that although 
she has not encouraged the perpetuation of local habits, 
local liturgies and local ceremonies in the West, she has, 
on the other hand, been very lenient towards those 
Easterns who have submitted themselves to the authority 
of the Holy See. Their language, their ceremonies, their 
wives are all left to the Uniate Roman of every kind : 



94 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE 

indeed the late Pope Leo Xlll. was extremely severe on the 
tendency to Romanism which some of these small bodies 
have shown at different times. I have been told, for 
instance, that the Armenians and the Ruthenians both 
attempted to substitute the Roman Canon for that of 
their own rite, and were only stopped from this vandalism 
by papal authority. The Holy See in its efforts to preserve 
distinctions of rites goes very far — and in Antioch you 
have the curious and extremely un-Catholic spectacle of 
five archbishops all in communion with the See of Rome ; 
and while the Greeks, the Armenians, the Sjnians, the 
Maronites, the Syro-Melchites, the Chaldeans, and the 
Ruthenians are all in communion with the Holy See, no 
Latin may make his communion at any Uniate altar, and 
no Uniate may communicate at a Latin Mass. 

Every year, however, there is now given ample oppor- 
tunity for Western Churchmen to see the rites of the 
East, for during the Octave of the Epiphany there is sung 
in S. Andrea High Mass after the various rites which I 
have named. This function was inaugurated in 1830 by 
Vmcenzo Pallotti, now Venerable, and has been continued 
ever since. If only because it gives one an opportunity 
of seeing a Greek Mass without the intervening iconostasis, 
the services at S. Andrea would be worth attending ; but 
apart from that, the strangeness of the language, the 
scarcely hidden savagery of some of the ceremonies, 
redolent of the desert and the older East, and the charm of 
the singing, all combine to make the Solenne Ottavario 
deir Epiphania del Signore at S. Andrea an experience that 
no visitor to Rome should miss. 

On the Eve of the Epiphany Dominic and I went to the 
Church of S. Athanasius of the Greeks. This is arranged 
exactly like an orthodox church, with a solid screen, icons, 
and absence of images. Vespers were pontifical ; the 
bishop, Mgr. Lazzaro Meladinoff, was vested in the ample, 
heavy garments of the East, and crowned with the Eastern 



ROME AT CHURCH 95 

crown. The service was very long — and at times the 
numerous lections even rather tedious ; but the wonderful 
singing of the youths of the Greek school was a thing never 
to be forgotten. At the end of Vespers the bishop solemnly 
blessed the font, singing the Plain Chant in an old, uncertain, 
rather husky voice, and waving candles in a measured, 
quaint manner that made us feel we had passed out of the 
Christian times into some semi- Jewish age. Then he 
returned to his throne, and stood there, holding in one 
hand an image of the Bambino, in the other a brush of 
short twigs. All the congregation — except a few sight- 
seers — went up to kiss the Bambino, and the Episcopal 
ring, and to receive on the forehead the blessing of the 
Holy Water. The Greeks have always at Epiphany 
commemorated the Baptism of Our Lord as well as the 
showing to the Gentiles, and this final ceremony of bene- 
diction is symbolic of the Baptism of the Saviour that all 
Christians must share. 

I cannot describe in detail the wonderful series of 
services at S. Andrea. Altogether there were eight 
Uniate solemn services. On Monday — Epiphany Day — 
there was Pontifical Mass of the Syrian Maronites ; on 
Tuesday, High Mass of the Greek rite ; on Wednesday, 
High Mass of the Chaldeans ; on Thursday, Pontifical Mass 
of the Syrians ; on Friday, High Mass of the Greek Ruthen- 
ians ; on Saturday, High Mass of the Greek Melchites ; 
on Sunday, Pontifical Mass of the Armenians ; and on 
Monday Pontifical Mass of the Greeks, at which the bishop, 
Mgr. Lazzaro Meladinoff , celebrated. Dominic and I went 
to all of the services, except on Tuesday and Saturday, 
but, as I say, to describe all of them would be tedious 
save for liturgical experts, for whom this book is 
not written. Of all the Masses the most dignified — 
it was curiously English in form and feeling — was the 
Armenian ; the most affecting was the Greek ; and 



96 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE 

the strangest, and to me the most wonderful, was the 
Syrian. 

It was not only the strangeness of the vestments, the 
Eastern appearance of the bishop, with his long, black 
Assyrian beard, and of his assistants ; the elaborate com- 
plexity of the service, baffling and yet strangely fascinating 
to the Western worshipper — but above all two things that 
charmed me, the wildness of the music, and the use of 
the *' fiabelli." I have no knowledge of music, and so 
cannot say what it was that made the music of these 
Easterns so different, so unearthly : but from the very 
first strains of it I realized that I had here a form of music 
that was to me greater, more essential, more elemental 
than even the Plain Chant. Only once — or twice — have 
I heard anything like it before. 

Years ago some enterprising showman brought over to 
England a company of Somali from Africa : I remember 
a war dance, as vividly as though I saw it yesterday, in 
which squatting on the ground the men clasped their 
hands, stamped on the soil, and kept up all the time a long 
wailing chant — almost all one note. This chant seemed to 
evoke all the savagery and mystery of Africa : its dull, 
repeated insistence, combined with the stamping and 
clapping, had an amazingly weird effect. Well, there was 
something of that, of course elaborated, in the Syrian 
music. 

Then, when Sada Yacco and her company brought 
Japanese plays to the Criterion, I heard a music, which my 
soul recognized as the music natural to me : the night I 
went to the theatre they had a comic interlude between 
two acts of a tragedy. A little misshapen figure, like one 
of the dwarfs with which Beardsley decorated Salome, 
came forward, with a drum ; another long, lean figure had 
some other musical instrument. The two mopped and 
bowed at each other, then smote their instruments and 
sang some dreadful little ditty, dancing the while, and 



ROME AT CHURCH 97 

smacking each other. The thing might have been a 
grotesque parody on the music and the movement of 
that Syrian Mass. The Syrian music seemed to shiver 
on the verge of Plain Chant. Time and again one heard a 
note or a phrase that seemed as if it would drop into some 
of the regular tones of Western music ; then with some 
wrenching discord the music broke free, and ran, scam- 
pered, flew, shrilled over the sand and through the palm- 
trees of the desert. As I listened, I could see S. Simon of the 
Pillar, gaunt, half naked, half blind, preaching with hoarse 
emphasis to the crowds from Alexandria ; and then came 
Antony, not the Antony of Pachomius so much as the 
Antony of Flaubert, struggling with living passions, the 
sin of the Cainites, the scandal of the Worshippers of the 
Serpent, the sordid horror of the Paternians — struggling 
and conquering, for all through the wild strain there was a 
note of victory, of a victory gained perhaps rather in the 
Eastern way, by yielding a little to the foe; and at times the 
victorious music was not so much triumphant as mocking. 
And then, when the bishop began the Canon the chant 
died away, and suddenly two of the assistants, who had 
been carrying long poles with what I thought were eagles 
on the top, began to shake these. They were the " fla- 
belli " ; and the figures at the top were cherubim, sur- 
rounded by little bells ; and all the time of the Consecra- 
tion the bells shook, shook continually with a beautiful 
running, subdued music, a kind of echo of the song of 
heaven which we, in our Latin rite, have reduced to the 
clanging gong that rouses the worshipper at the Sanctus. 
I have -never heard anything like those bells. Perpetual, 
persistent, they seemed to ripple along on the highroad 
of the King ; they whispered, they chattered, they sang, 
unfalteringly, securely, and all the tenor of their music 
was " Coming, coming, coming ... he is coming ; be 
ready, be ready, be ready." They were evocative, magical, 
mystical — they seemed to open doors that had always been 



98 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE 

shut, to disclose secrets that had never been spoken, to 
describe a beauty that no one had seen, to invite us on 
untrodden paths and to the very gardens enclosed of God. 

When the Consecration was over and the bishop had 
made his communion, Dominic touched my arm. He was 
ghastly white. 

'* Are you seedy ? " He just nodded his head. 

" Shall we go ? " 

" Please." 

So out we went. When we were in the street Dominic 
gave a huge sigh and exclaimed : '* If I'd stayed any 
longer, I should have been sick." 

" Good gracious ! Why ? The garlic ? " 

" No ; that horrible music : it nearly killed me. I never 
heard anything so terrible, so — ^so — obscene, so dreadful. 
I can still feel it. It was awful." 

** But," I protested, *' I thought it was simply wonder- 
ful. I liked it better than the music at S. Atanasio. It 
was more primitive — easier to understand. It's the kind 
of music I should like to sing to " 

*' Primitive. It was savage. I always knew you were 
not musical, but I did not know you could enjoy a sort of 
perverted music. It wasn't — wasn't clean." 

I never argue for long about music with Dominic ; and 
I saw that he really had been made physically disgusted : 
it amazed me, it amazes me still. And I wonder which of 
us is right. 

We were quite nervous about going to the rest of the 
Epiphany functions — but no other music produced any 
similar effect on Dominic : though he was a little uneasy 
with the Armenian. On the Octave-day, however, we 
both went securely and gladly to the Pontifical Mass of the 
Greeks. The Mass used was that of S. John Chrysostom, 
and we had, as I said, the rare privilege of seeing a Greek 
Mass from beginning to end, without any iccnostasis. 



ROME AT CHURCH 99 

Little curtains, shrouding sacristies, were put up for the 
deacon to enter and emerge from ; but the whole action 
of the Mass was visible. The most striking ceremony is 
certainly the blessing, by the bishop, of the congregation 
with the two candlesticks. The bishop comes forward, 
supported by the Archimandrites ; in each hand he holds 
a candlestick, one with three, the other with two branches. 
One represents the Most Holy Trinity, the other the Divine 
and Human Natures of Our Lord. With these he blesses 
the people, making the sign of the cross three times, and 
doing it with astonishing skill. We had seen this cere- 
mony when we attended the Epiphany Vespers ; and 
while he held the candlesticks there he sang an Epiphany 
hymn, of which we could distinguish the words. 

Scarcely less interesting than the services was the con- 
gregation of S. Andrea. There were many who had come, 
like us, as visitors to Rome, and who welcomed this unusual 
opportunity of seeing East and West meet ; there were 
musical experts, one man who was always there, and who 
made elaborate notes of the music in a large volume. 
Dominic says that he shut his book up at the Syrian Mass 
"in despair." "Not at all," I retorted; "he was so 
entranced he couldn't be bothered making notes." There 
were many students from the different colleges, some of 
whom had the texts of the liturgies, and tried diligently 
to follow the Mass in the strange reversed languages of the 
Orient. There were a few ordinary tourists, who had 
wandered in to see the Domenichino Evangelists, and 
retreated in disorder from the packed transepts. There 
were a good many pious Romans, who perhaps had at last 
determined to see what was so customary to them that they 
were in danger of missing it altogether. One morning I 
remember an old woman jogged my elbow just about the 
time of the Offertory. " Si ? " I whispered. "It is 
Mass, isn't it ? " " Si, si," and she turned to her devotions 
again. But a few moments or so afterwards, hearing no 



100 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE 

bells, and seeing no genuflections, she jogged me again. 
"Is it a good Mass ? " " Yes," I assured her, and she 
went on praying in contentment. Where she imagined 
she had got to I don't know ; perhaps she thought the 
Methodists worshipped hke that, or that she had caught 
the fellow-countrymen of the Syndic at their devotions. 

After the Uniate Masses there was preached each day 
a sermon in a foreign tongue ; but not in a language 
corresponding to the various liturgies. French, English, 
German, Spanish and Polish were the languages of the 
sermons ; and as I looked at the list of the preachers, I 
could not help thinking, " Why don't we have the Mass in 
these languages as well ? Why should it be permissible 
to say Mass in Armenian, and not in English ; in Syrian, 
and not in German ; in Chaldee, and not in Spanish ? " I 
was very much impressed with this piece of silent evidence 
that the Church of the West has forsaken her old ideals. 
Surely it cannot be a matter of principle that the tongue 
(other than Latin) in which it is lawful to offer the Holy 
Sacrifice should be the language of small or remote 
peoples. When will the Western Church boldly overcome 
this anomaly, and permit not only the Mass but the Divine 
Office to be said in the tongues of the people of Europe 
and America ? 

We did not hear any of the sermons. One of the English 
was to be preached by a famous Jesuit who has a great 
reputation as an orator. And we meant to stay and listen. 
But he prevented us. The beginning of the sermon was 
like this : " What did the Wise Men come to see ? Did 
they come to see Kings and Palaces ? Did they travel so 
far after the Heavenly Star to see Wise Men ? Did they 
leave their distant land to go to the wealthy ? Did 

they " But there is no need to go on. The preacher 

seemed thoroughly set on exhausting all the subjects 
which were not the motive of the Magi's pilgrimage ; and 



ROME AT CHURCH loi 

so we left him doing it. Isn't it a pity that on such 
an occasion a man could not be natural, forget his rhetoric 
and his oratorical lessons, and speak simply and plainly ? 
What is wrong with modern sermons is not as a rule their 
lack of matter, but a strange passion for clinging to the 
frills and fashions of preaching : to indulge in ten words 
where one would be more than enough. It is a typically 
English habit — because English rhetoric has not, as a 
rule, the beauty of form that saves the French, or the 
passion of wit that saves the Italian. Its greatest master 
was, I suppose, Mr Gladstone ; and it was of something 
of Gladstone's that Huxley said, ** Gladstone's attack on 
you is one of the best things he has written. I do not 
think that there is more than fifty per cent, more verbiage 
than necessary, nor any sentence with more than two 
meanings." 

That would be a golden rule for all preachers to try and 
keep — " not more than fifty per cent, more verbiage than 
necessary, and no sentence with more than two meanings." 
It would not unduly restrict the most luxurious talent. 

Up on the Celian Hill, on the road called after San 
Stefano Rotondo, is a gateway that leads to the Convent 
and Hospital of the Maternal Heart of Mary. 

We had two friends staying in the convent — one an old 
parishioner of Dominic's — and so we went up to see them, 
to have tea in the guest-chamber and to attend Benediction. 

Benediction is a service whose beauty varies astonish- 
ingly with its performance. I have been at Benediction 
— generally in Jesuit churches — where my whole spirit 
has cried out against the service as a vulgarism : it seemed 
like an advertisement, a demonstration, a rather florid 
challenge. Then there are Benedictions which are spoiled 
by the music. At another convent — more famous than 
that of the Little Company of Mary — by the Trinita de' 
Monti, we once went to Vespers. It was terrible. Half 



102 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE 

the people in the church had apparently come to a concert. 
They were yawning, sitting, talking. And the music ! — 
of course the voices were astonishingly good — as instru- 
ments ; but we had that tawdry, flagrant " O Salutaris " 
of Gounod's, a tune so debased that it would be more 
reverent if the singer simply sang the scale before the 
Divine Victim. Dominic even admitted that it was 
worse than the Syrians, and the moment benediction had 
been given we slipped out, as we heard rumours (which 
were false) of more sacred songs afterwards. 

Then at Normandy I once attended a Benediction — 
held in a chapel that was really nothing but the end of a 
hospital ward, when they sang ** Sacris Solemniis" — "they" 
being three or four old Carmelites with thin, throaty 
voices, and a few peasant women in the congregation. 
And the solo parts of the Tantum Ergo were broken and 
hoarse, and the responding verses too loud and untuneful ; 
and yet the whole service was redolent of love and service 
and devotion and reality. 

The Benediction at S. Anselmo is as perfect as their 
Mass. But the severity of their music scarcely suits a 
devotion that is nothing if not familiar, homely, an act of 
friendship. 

And so I remember best the Benediction at the con- 
vent on the Celian ; we went to it four or five times. 
I suppose there were about twenty or thirty sisters ; 
some sat right in front in the little chapel ; then came the 
pews for the visitors ; and then more seats behind, reserved 
more especially for the choir. The hospital, I was told, 
was run by Englishwomen ; as it happens, all the nuns I 
spoke to were Irish, and I believe the Mother Superior 
and Foundress, still alive, is an Irishwoman. 

It may be fanciful, but I thought I had caught a hint of 
that yearning sob, half humorous and wholly pathetic, 
and quite in earnest, which marks so much of Irish 
popular melody — I thought I caught it in the first words 



ROME AT CHURCH 103 

of the hymn. And then they began the Litany of Our 
Lady. When that is well sung, by women's voices, I 
think it excels in sheer poetic beauty any other litany of 
the Church. It does not reach to the cosmic sweep of the 
old Easter Tuesday and Rogationtide Litany : there is 
not the marshalling of the saints which comes there. But 
it has, this hymn to Mary, a note of poignant splendour, 
of personal passion, of a gay happiness that somehow 
suits Benediction, and is characteristic of Catholic devo- 
tion to the Mother of God. What a wonderful series of 
titles is that at the beginning, starting with Mater Christi 
and ending with Mater Salvatoris ; between these two 
enormous realities, we hail Mary by all that was necessary 
for her to be, if she was to be really Mother of Christ, and 
Mother of the Saviour. Before that honour came to her 
she was Mother of the grace of God, the purest, the chastest, 
the unspotted, the immaculate, the lovable, the wonderful, 
— all these spring from her destiny as Mother of Christ 
and Mother of the Saviour. Then we hail Mary the 
maiden, Mary, daughter of Joachim and Anna, Mary the 
simple, trustful girl of Nazareth, praise her for her pru- 
dence, her worshipfulness, her capacity to engage the 
hearts of sinners, her power, her kindness, and her faith- 
fulness. One girl's voice soared with an unutterable beauty 
when we came to the titles which the poets have given Mary ; 

*' Rosa Mystica, 
Turris Davidica, 
Turris ebumea, 
Domus aurea. 
Foederis area, 
Stella matutina." 

How triumphantly, how securely we could sing the Ora 
pro nobis : 

'' Rose of roses, mystic rose, 
Fairest flower of all that grows 
In the great God's garden close 
Ora pro nobis ! 



104 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE 

Tower of David set on high, 
Tower of finest ivory, 
Tower and guide to passers-by, 
Ora pro nobis ! 

Mary, house of purest gold. 
House of treasures manifold. 
House that heaven alone can hold, 
Ora pro nobis ! 

Ark of promise, seen afar. 

Gate of heaven, thy bolts unbar ! 

Mary, shining morning star, 

Ora pro nobis ! '' 

And after the poets you have the plain people ; the echo 
of popular proverbs sounds through such a title as " Salus 
infirmorum," *'a sight for sore e'en"; hope of the sinners; 
and consoler of the oppressed. Then, now that Mary in 
her office, Mary in her character, Mary in her beauties, 
Mary in her attributes has been honoured, we pass on, still 
sustained by the lyrical rapture of the nuns' singing, to 
pray to Mary in her heavenly glory — Mary the Queen. And 
so with Regina Sacratissimi Rosarii, the prayer to Mary 
ends. 

And we remember : we look about us, dazed. Who 
are we, unclean, that dare come to her, the pure, the 
perfect, come in our sins ; and then with a sudden change 
we swerve round, in longing anguish, to Him who alone 
can cleanse from sin, to Him who alone can take us to His 
Mother — and break out : 

'' Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, 
Parce nobis, Domine ! " 

In a moment an act of contrition can be made. And how 
could any Christian help making it, with that cry in his 
ears ? And so, cleansed and penitent, joyful and humble, 
we sing the Tantum ergo, and acclaim the Blessed Sacra- 
ment with the inspired word of the Psalter : 

** Omne delectamentum in se habentem." 



ROME AT CHURCH 105 

Sometimes one has wondered whether the Latin Church 
has done well in allowing extra-liturgical devotions of the 
Blessed Sacrament ; when one thinks of all the hideous 
quarrelling in the West over the Sacrament of the Altar, 
and then turns to the unity of the East, it may seem that 
part of our disunion is a judgment for our use of the 
Sacrament for what I have called advertising, declamatory 
purposes. But in the calm and certainty of a religious 
house one feels that Benediction and Exposition are not 
merely lawful, but natural : they are the overflowing of 
human love.^ 

^ It is curious how the sense of mystery, while it is still implicit 
in the Uturgical forms of the West, seems to have been lost by the 
people in high places, by officials, bishops, nuncios, legates and 
so on. The astonishing proposal to carry the Host through the 
streets of London, happily frustrated at the instigation, it is said, 
of a devout Catholic, was an amazing instance of this. The modern 
Latin is too apt to treat his most holy things as the Jews treated 
the Ark when they sent it into battle with the Philistines, and to 
subject the shrine of the Shekinah to the degradation of sharing 
a roof with Dagon. It is not thus that we win in battles of 
religion, not by this aggressive advertisement of the central 
things of the Faith. I suppose that a good deal of this is due to 
a wrong idea of mystery. Mystery in its full meaning is expressed 
in the formula '' ay ta aylois " ; a mystery is precise^ not a secret 
which must not be told : it is a secret that must be told, but only 
to the fit, to the initiate. It is something which is known to the 
elect — that is why S. Paul calls marriage a great mystery — 
marriage is something essentially unintelligible to the unmarried. 
Though with regard to that one must remember that it is not so 
easy to get married — in the Christian sense — as most people imagine. 

Now the common idea of a mystery is far away from all this. A 
mystery is just a secret, something that you won't tell, or you 
won't reveal, something to be hinted at ; the way to it is not 
through a door flung wide, but through a curtain only gradually 
drawn away. A mystery has become something that you are 
anxious to flaunt without explaining, and to display without dis- 
covering ; it is the palladium, not of people who have been chosen 
out of the world, but of people who have arrogated to themselves 
a superiority over their fellows. 



io6 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE 

Still I am not sure whether in secular or parish churches 
the privilege of Benediction should not be more scantily 
given ; and also more associated in time with the Sacrifice 
of the Mass, as is done in German churches, and as was, in 
all likelihood, the custom of Renascence times when the 
devotion arose. Certainly Benediction and Exposition 
are devotions that should be practised in quiet, and where 
there is no sound of the disbeliever or the mocker, or even 
the murmur of the well-intentioned, but misunderstanding, 
Catholic. It is eminently a kind of prolonging of the Kiss 
of Peace, and of the moment of Exposition ; and just as 
no one who is in love cares to make a public show of his 
affection, but keeps his caresses, his endearments, his 
whispers for the hour of solitude, so with Our Lord, the 
lover of Jesus in His Sacrament will prefer to meet him in 
quiet, in that passionate hush when all the world and the 
sorrows of the world and its joys are seen only in the per- 
fect mirror of the Sacred Heart. 

It was on i8th January that Dominic and I went to 
pay a last visit to San Pietro in Vaticano. We lingered 
for a while at the Madonna of the Pieta, in the chapel near 
the crooked column, which Bernini chose as model for the 
twisted height of the pillars of the baldachino ; and then 
we wandered right round into the apse, and found, to our 
surprise. Pontifical High Mass was proceeding at the 
altar there. Then I remembered that it was the Feast of 
S. Peter's Chair at Rome. It was under the actual chair 
which, according to tradition, S. Peter used, that on this 
morning Cardinal Rampolla was singing Mass. It was 
a reverent service, even if the ceremonies seemed a trifle 
over-familiar to English eyes ; but the congregation was 
not devout. It was not so much a congregation as a 
crowd — a crowd that had gathered there without any 
particular reason, and stayed without any particular 
object. It was not the visitors — or at least not the 



ROME AT CHURCH 107 

foreign visitors to Rome who behaved worst ; it was an 
Italian gentleman standing next me who chattered loudly 
through the entire service, and kept his back turned to 
the altar, save for one brief moment, when he hurriedly 
turned round to acknowledge the sacring bell. 

I suppose what most people stayed for was the music. 
It was a Mass of Palestrina's, and certainly was most 
desirably rendered. Dominic would have it that the choir 
played about too much with the old music ; that it was 
** given its head " and indulged in frills and trills to a 
disgraceful extent. Still he admitted as fully as I that 
the manner in which the Offertory sentence — Tu es Petrus 
et super hanc petram aedificabo Ecclesiam meam, et portae 
inferi non praevalebunt adversus eam : et tibi dabo claves 
regni coelorum — was rendered could not be excelled. The 
eternal promise swayed up to the apse, was caught there 
for a brief moment, and then thrown up into the dome, 
where it broke into spears of sound that carried a certainty, 
almost of defiance, right along the building. The voices 
were not, perhaps, devotional enough ; there was some- 
thing of the opera about the way in which they rendered 
the Gloria ; but as instruments, as mere melody, they were 
superb. The strong, sexless music, full not so much of 
meditation as of thought, expressive in so high a degree of 
organized, embattled religion, tinged ever so slightly with 
that scholasticism that the pure plain-song escapes, was 
not ill-mated with the professional choir of the Vatican. 

It was our fate to leave Rome without hearing High 
Mass in what is in some ways the most perfect church in 
the city. If you want to see how decidedly the church 
adopted local customs, and how definitely the order of 
Christian worship is allied to the older traditions of things 
Roman, go to San Clemente. There you have the best 
pattern possible of an ancient basilica. The church is 
arranged on the ancient model — that is, you have an apse, 



io8 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE 

at the back of which is the bishop's throne — the one at 
present at San Clemente is of the twelfth century — and 
this chair is flanked by other stone seats for the clergy. 
The High Altar stands on the line of the apse, in the middle, 
and when it is used the celebrant faces the people, looking 
out over the mensa. Lower down the church are two 
ambones — the present ones were made for John VIII. 
(873-882) and moved by Paschal II. to the upper church, 
which he built in the early years of the twelfth century — 
from which the Epistle and Gospel are read when High 
Mass is celebrated : and what are these but a development 
of the rostra, which for centuries the Romans had used 
for declamation and oratory ? The church is in the hands 
of Irish Dominicans, and we were shown over it by one of 
the brothers. 

" Do you have High Mass every Sunday ? " 

" Indeed, then, and we don't. We manage it only 
for the feast, and at Easter, or perhaps once or twice 
beside." 

With the brother we descended into the lower church, 
the finest example left in Rome of early mediaeval building. 
According to tradition the first Church of San Clemente 
was built on the site of the house occupied by Clement, 
Bishop of Rome, or else on the site where the Christians 
of his day were in the habit of meeting for public worship. 
Beneath this building, it is said, there is another of the 
second century B.C., which was used as a temple of 
Mithras. The Clementine building is, of course, of the 
first centuiy a.d. It is now usually submerged with 
water ; and we were not able to visit it, although our 
attendant friar gave us a picture postcard showing the 
Prince and Princess of Wales, in old-fashioned garments 
of the middle sixties, listening to Prior Mulhooly's dis- 
course on his discoveries. 

The next church was used, perhaps, from about 387 to 
1084, when it suffered badly in the general sack of Rome ; 




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SAN CLEMENTE 



ROME AT CHURCH 109 

and was replaced by the new church built by Paschal II. 
The chief glory, both of the upper and lower churches, is 
the wonderful series of mosaics and frescoes. If Italy in 
general, and Florence in particular, is the home of fresco- 
painting, Rome is more particularly mistress of the mosaic. 
It is a form of art whose attraction is a little hard to 
define. One is quite sure that mosaic has been wrongly 
used in those marvellous examples of misapplied ingenuity, 
the mosaics in San Pietro, where oil paintings are copied 
with a vraisemblance that at a distance can deceive the 
ordinary eye. There is none of this effort to imitate 
another art, with such different aims as has oil painting, 
in the mosaics in San Clemente. I sometimes think that 
the beginning of " values " and ** tone" in pictorial art 
can be found in mosaic work ; it seems to me natural 
enough to suppose that the craftsman was more struck by 
the effect of juxtaposed colours when his actual work con- 
sisted of juxtaposing particles of mosaic. I mean that in 
early painting line is the dominant feature ; it is purity, 
and ultimately suavity and buoyancy of line that the great 
painters strove after ; their colour is frequently conven- 
tional, governed not by its suitability for the scheme of 
the picture, but by its obedience to the canons of tradition. 
With the worker in mosaic the line is purely conventional ; 
while even in the early frescoes of the lower church we 
can see the painter struggling after expression in line. It 
is ninth-century work, and there is a real effort to produce 
an effect by line, although only by the most rigid use of 
angular and awkward gesticulation. This, of course, is 
partly due to the period ; but I think that, compared to a 
mosaic work, it will be found that the tendency to allow 
the line to be, so to speak, a series of lines, broken, eccentric 
and rather undignified is far greater than in the fresco. 

For instance, we can see in the upper church the wonder- 
ful mosaics in the apse. They are of the twelfth century, 
and mark that departure from early Christian artistic 



no A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE 

ideals that I have already noticed. Christ is here not 
throned, nor ascendant, nor the Good Shepherd, not even 
crowned on the cross, but hanging, dejected, disfigured, 
emaciated with anguish ; His feet are supported by the 
small cross-beam, and at the foot of His cross stand His 
mother and S. John. Then the artist seems to have re- 
membered that, after all, the sanctuary, with its surround- 
ings, was an occasion for displaying Christian joy, and below 
the cross he has pictured the River of Life ; while above 
the head of the Divine Victim the Hand of God holds the 
crown of victory. The four rivers of the Holy Gospel spring 
from the fountain of life ; and there the harts drink of 
the water springs after which they have desired and panted. 
The fountain feeds also a tree whose foliage ambitions 
upwards and covers the semi-dome of the apse ; this tree 
is the Vine, whose planter is God, and in the branches are 
the Apostles, whose life is only with and of the Vine, Jesus 
Christ ; and on either side the pelican, type of the Sacred 
Passion, signifies that nothing avails save by the out- 
letting of the Blood of the Crucified. Below all this are 
two little processions of sheep coming, one from Beth- 
lehem, the other from Jerusalem, one from the city of His 
birth, the other from the city of His condemnation, the 
children of the Saviour and the children of the King, the 
sheep of the Son of Mary, and the sheep of the Son of David 
— moving, each on their own road, to the Lamb, the Son 
of God, who stands in the midst. 

Over the frescoes in the Cappella della Passione we did 
not linger. Whether they be by Masaccio or Masolino 
they belong quite definitely to that school of Tuscan 
painting which, while full of a certain decorative chann, 
misses the religious beauty which lingers, for me, even in 
painters commonly regarded as secular, like Pinturichio. 
There is a lack of fervour, a freedom from passion which, 
while it does not achieve the immortal colour of the great 
Raphael, does effectually prevent me from getting that 



ROME AT CHURCH iii 

acute pleasure from their work which can be found in 
indifferent pictures by inferior masters. 

There are two frescoes in the lower church of great 
historical importance. One, in the nave, attributed to 
the eighth century, is the earliest representation of the 
Crucifixion in fresco ; another shows Our Lord blessing in 
the Greek instead of in the Latin mode. This is of parti- 
cular interest as San Clemente is connected historically 
with S. Cyril and S. Methodius, apostles to the Slavs ; 
they brought back the body of S. Clement from the Crimea, 
and later on S. Methodius argued with John VI I L the 
right of the Slavs to have the Mass in their own tongue. 

Then in the fresco of the Assumption of Our Lady, to 
which I have already alluded, there are several points of 
interest. First, the figure of Leo IV. is represented with 
the square nimbus, used only for living people ; this fixes 
the date of the fresco between 847-855, so it is one of the 
earliest representations of this incident. Our Lord has a 
cruciform nimbus; the angels supporting him are also 
nimbed ; while the Apostles, who are watching their 
Mother return to her Son, are neither vested sacerdotally 
nor have they nimbuses. The fresco is, then, a curious 
mixture of realistic and conventional work. It is obvious 
that the absence of nimbuses is no mere accident, and I 
believe that the painter wished to give what he thought 
was a plain picture of the event, and so represented the 
Apostles as he fancied they originally appeared. Our 
Lady is given a nimbus because she has already entered 
into glory, and for the same reason her Son and the angels 
receive their symbol of honour. The Apostles, of course, 
could not be given the square nimbus which is given to the 
Pope : if they were nimbed at all they must have the 
nimbus of heavenly glory, not that of earthly honour. 
In some ways, then, this ninth-century fresco may be 
taken as the parent of those later pictures of this mystery 
in which convention is openly abandoned, and the story 



112 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE 

frankly followed with an accurate attention to the recorded 
details. 

The friar who took us round the church was very friendly, 
and before leaving we asked him questions about different 
things in Rome. It was a delight to hear an Irish accent, 
even if the speaker had not also a good many entertaining 
things to tell us of the life in Rome. Among other things, 
I asked him, " Do you know the Church of S. Maria 
Egiziaca ? " 

" I do.'' 

" It was an old pagan temple, wasn't it ? " 

" Ah ! that it was, and they still quarrel as to what 
goddess had it. Some say it was Fortuna, others Mater 
Matuta, who was Queen of the Sea, and of the harbours." 

" Do they ever have Mass there ? We tried to get in 
the other day, and failed. I have always been interested 
in S. Mary of Egypt and should like to go now, if it is 
possible." 

" Ah, then ; is it a Mass that you want ? Och ! I 
shouldn't go there, if I were you. To be sure it's only 
once or twice a year they have a Mass ; and do you know 
they don't behave at all well during their devotions. They 
will call to one another from one end of the church to 
the other in the middle of the Holy Mass : and I have 
heard " — he sank his voice to an impressive whisper — " I 
have heard that they will even spit on the pavement ! 
Oh no ! you mustn't go there. I shouldn't like you to 
see things of that kind." 

We kept a perfectly straight face at his warning, but 
it was difficult when we remembered the notices about 
spitting in nearly every church in the town ; in fact, we 
had remarked on their absence from the Church of San 
Clemente. But it was rather pleasant to find this Irish 
brother quietly contemptuous and distressed about the 
habits of the people in whose country he was living ; and 



ROME AT CHURCH 113 

talking, in an assured and determined way, as though he 
and his brothers were the true Romans, the real repre- 
sentatives of Catholic worship in the city. And it is not 
for me to say that he was wrong, though I should hke to 
put in a plea, if he will allow it, for the Church of San 
Anselmo on the Aventine. 

This is not a guide-book and I shall not attempt to give 
any account of every important church in Rome ; we did 
not even see every church that might claim the attention 
of the visitor. In Rome, more than in any other great 
city, personal feeling should be allowed its full play ; 
there is so little, and so great, a difference between one 
Roman basilica and another that it is hopeless to justify 
one's preferences except by purely personal reasons. 
What one misses most in Rome are churches to love. I 
mean that you wander from one magnificent temple to 
another, and yet are not overcome, as a rule, by that quick 
happy flush of something found, and something needed. 
It is a sensation that I have often experienced in Cornwall, 
in England, in Germany. You walk out from S. Ives, up 
the long, dirty, discomfortable and rather ungainly 
Stennack, straight up the road to Zennor, where the big 
hill in front shoulders towards the sky. About two miles 
from the village you turn off the highroad and go through 
field after field, where the cattle seem to graze on granite 
and every stile you cross is the stile of a churchyard — and 
there in the end you find the Cornish church towered, 
four-square, amazingly restful, surprisingly beautiful, 
adequate with a heavenly and eternal adequacy. And 
not all the modern woodwork, nor the feminine decora- 
tions, nor the disheartening way in which you stub your 
fingers against stone, instead of finding water, in the holy- 
water stoup, can remove from you that complete assur- 
ance of peacefiil strength, of tranquil and unboastful 
simplicity. 



114 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE 

Or, in Bristol, a little tired of S. Mary Redcliffe and the 
Cathedral, a little overcome with the splendours of those 
two great fanes, you suddenly turn in to S. Mark, and then 
you have a feeling of personal business in the place, you 
are one in memory with the old builders, the builders 
who mixed their stones (if one may adapt Opie's famous 
retort) with sympathy and prayer. 

Now the churches in Rome are civic, are patriarchal, are 
papal, are splendid and magnificent decrees of the Univer- 
sal Church. They stand for Unity, for Catholicity, for 
Apostolicity — they stand for the great notes of the Church 
— but — but — one misses rather the greater note of personal 
love, of human sympathy, of divine sacrifice. 

But I forget the shrines. That is, is it not, the secret 
at the heart of relic-worship ? One has seen old women, 
and children, ay, and young men, come into a church 
eagerly, alert, conscious, desirous. They almost forget 
the church, they almost forget the tabernacle, and they 
run to the Confessio — and then babble into the ear of 
the saint things too trivial to trouble God with. Idolatry ? 
Surely not. In sterner countries the trivial side of life, 
the foolishnesses, and the little aches and longings, the 
small losses and gasps and climbings of the human spirit 
are left out of religion altogether. That is why we have 
that horrible tradition that a *' good " person is rather 
unpleasant : of course no unpleasant person can be really 
good. And your Puritan doesn't think of praying in his 
Calvinistic chapel to be made less sour-faced, more 
sunny, more obviously happy. If he approached God in 
His saints he might gain that sweetness, that lightness of 
temperament which, with all their disadvantages, do seem 
akin to the religion of Him who bade us not to be anxious 
over to-morrow, and to love one another so much that the 
world should know we were His disciples. 

I feel that one reason for the sublime, rather heartless 
sanity of Roman Christianity, for the persistent discour- 




THE TEMPLE OF VESTA 



ROME AT CHURCH 115 

agement of the mysticism which, as persistently and by 
suppression more strongly, rises in her midst, can be found 
in the history of the Rome that saw the growth of the 
Gospel. We have to remember that in this city, where 
Peter died, and Paul ; where all that was strongest and 
most governing and clearest in Christianity was to find a 
home ; where we were to have that great series of Imperial 
rulers who fostered the civilization and kept the peace of 
the world — that there had been strange growths of strange 
religions. Roman architecture, Roman devotion has no 
different source than had Roman religion : it grew on the 
decaying folly of Imperial pride, and in very terror of the 
hidden Eastern religions ; the builders of its churches have 
contrived to remove from them the note of secrecy, of 
personal love, and of personal devotion. The Rome of 
Hadrian was under the rule of that sovran whose praises 
Baudelaire, centuries afterwards, hymned : 

" Tu seras la reine des hommes aux yeux verts dont j'ai 
serre aussi la gorge dans mes caresses nocturnes ; de 
ceux-la qui aiment la mer, la mer immense, tumultueuse 
et verte, I'eau informe et multiforme, le lieu ou ils ne sont 
pas, la femme qu'ils ne connaissent pas, les fleurs sinistres 
qui ressemblent aux encensoirs d'une religion inconnue, les 
parfums qui troublent la volont^, et les animaux sauvages 
et voluptueux qui sont les emblemes de leur folic." 

The passion for the unknown, the desire that never achieves 
— that had been the hell of Rome : it was that which 
Christianity dispossessed, and so in Rome you find no 
official sign of that wonderful transformation which wor- 
ships, instead of desiring, the unknown, and achieves by 
loss, and by the passage of the dark night of the soul. 

The story of Roman Christianity is thus the story of an 
emergence into light. It does not despise the beautiful 
things which grow in darkness ; but it compels the dark 
to deliver up whatever of truth and beauty it holds, and 



ii6 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE 

then so merges them in the Hght of every day that, except 
with the most eternal mysteries, such as the Mass, we seem 
to lose that hidden beauty, that fountain sealed, that glory 
of great colour and restful drawing, which fills the Catholi- 
cism of other lands. And here we can see how much in a 
way Rome, by destroying, created. The very emphasis 
laid by the Church on the laws of reason, on exact truth, 
on clarity of outline, the very reason for openness, for public 
mysteries led, inevitably, not only among those who were 
inimical to the Church, to a tendency that recalls the older 
and permanent quality of withholding, of remoteness. The 
Church which, in its influence on the supreme mind of Dante, 
gave us a supernatural world that is rather more exact in 
treatment than the average contemporary map of the mun- 
dane world, gave us also a S. Catherine of Genoa, with her 
poignant, individualistic, acutely loverlike and mystical 
treatise on Purgatory ; gave us also in a later day the in- 
comparable vision, fruit of devotion and friendship, which 
inspires " The Dream of Gerontius." Nay^do you ever 
in any other community get so startling, so whole-centred, 
so clear-eyed a woman as S. Theresa, who in the midst of 
mystical experiences from the heart of the rose and the 
cross, will write to her friends, *' Never despise reason " ? 

This revelation, however, hardly seems to have affected 
Rome itself ; its saints are the wonderful, practical people 
like S. Philip ; and so you do not have in the Church, as a 
rule, that aroma of wonder and hope and ecstasy which 
fills the whole of some lesser shrines. Service we find, 
sacrifice we find, beauty and splendour and elaborateness 
and awe : but not Mary at the feet of the Master, not the 
broken box of alabaster — and if there is spikenard it is 
not wasted supremely and simply on the Divine Feet, but 
measured, not at all grudgingly, but with grave decency 
and order, for fear of those evil spirits of indulgence and 
wicked exultation that may still haunt the shrines of their 
ancient allegiances. 



ROME AT CHURCH 117 

Still there are a few churches which do compel love as 
well as admiration and awe. One is S. Maria in Cosmedin 
— Our Lady of the Decoration — a charming building, of the 
same type internally as San Clemente. It stands in the 
quarter where the Greeks once lived, and used to be called 
S. Maria in Schola Graeca. Something of the Greek 
spirit lingers in the place. There is a lightness, a delicacy 
of touch which are indescribably fascinating. The 
church and its contents are not at all of one period ; yet 
the Gothic tabernacle does not clash with the rest of the 
basilica, and the ambones, which are more exquisite than 
those in San Clemente, have a suitability with the screen 
that might easily be sought for in vain in the details 
of a church which was the work of one period alone. 

There is but one church in Rome where the Gothic has 
managed to survive. It is not Gothic of a very distinct 
type ; or, rather, it has not those details, such as the rood- 
screen, heavy, solid, of carved wood or stone, which make 
so mysterious an appeal in our old English churches. Yet 
Gothic it is, and we felt, on entering it, that somehow we 
were out of Rome. It seemed impossible to realize that 
from here Giordano Bruno was led away on 9th February 
1600 to be burned in the Campo di Fiore, that here his 
splendid words were spoken, ** Ah ! the sentence you pro- 
nounce — does it not trouble you more at this moment than 
it troubles me ? " — a word that should have found some 
place in the armour of the religious bigotry that murdered 
him. It was here too that Galileo knelt to be taught 
astronomy by men who could not even recognize the true 
meaning of the Bible ; from here he was taken to his 
gentle imprisonment near Florence. The church has 
these gloomy memories, because it is the Church of the 
Dominicans ; the sons of Dominic were, alas ! only too for- 
ward in the work of the Holy Inquisition. In time, perhaps, 
we shall find Catholic theologians and ecclesiastics who 
will write of Bruno as they now write of Joan of Arc ; at 



ii8 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE 

present you can only find him referred to as the " notori- 
ous apostate friar " who " resisted all efforts to make him 
repent." The bitterness of hatred will outlast even the 
bitterness of death. 

It is not, though, of these things that one thinks in S. 
Maria sopra Minerva. We thought first of that marvellous 
girl, Catherine of Siena, who brought back the Bishop of 
Rome to his own city, and whose ashes lie under the High 
Altar, with the image of her in the robes of her order. 
To her in 1866 Pius IX. dedicated the city of Rome ; but 
the people are still faithful to S. Francesca ; and somehow 
S. Catherine does not belong here as she does in her own 
Siena. Still here is her room — or rather the four walls of 
it, moved from the Via S. Chiara in 1637. 

Then it was in the friary connected with this church 
that Beato Angelico lived while he was painting the frescoes 
for Pope Nicolas ; and here, far from his own Florence, 
he lies buried — Hie jacet Venerabilis pictor Frater Joannes 
de Florentia Ordinis praedicatorum. Here too is the tomb 
of that master of the sacristies, Durandus, Bishop of 
Mende, whose Rationale divinorum officiorum is still the 
best guide to the spirit of Gothic worship. The tomb is 
peculiarly beautiful, the work of that Giovanni, scion of the 
house of Cosmas, who designed the tomb of Gonsalvo, 
cardinal in S. Maria Maggiore. This tomb, with the 
graceful, Gothic canopy sheltering Our Lady and the Child 
done in mosaic is an exquisite reconciliation between the 
genius of the North and the South. It is the only thing in 
Rome, to my mind, which gives the slightest indication 
that there might have been, had the genius of the place 
been less prepotent, a Roman Gothic that would have 
combined the qualities of sun and shadow, of mass 
and detail in some building that would have been 
the wonder of a united Christendom. It is this emotion, 
born in S. Maria sopra Minerva, which makes one 
love the Church of the Dominicans ; I could feel there. 



ROME AT CHURCH 119 

that, after all, when artists and archaeologists talk lightly 
about the Latin temperament and the northern spirit — 
separating them as the modern realist will separate East 
and West, they are only perpetuating a quarrel that has in it 
nothing of the essential. It could just as easily be argued 
that as in the South they have plenty of sun and warmth, 
therefore they would prefer the cool shadows, the hidden 
comers, and the obscure chapels of our huge Gothic build- 
ings, would revel in the sun smiling through the coloured 
glory of glass, glancing on the lamps of the sanctuary, and 
crowning with clear, beaconlike rays the beauty of the 
reredos ; and that we who have so little light, so little sun, 
would build huge basilicas in which we could have as much 
of God's gracious daylight as possible, instead of having 
to peer at ill-printed hymn-books in the dark naves and dim 
chapels of our Gothic churches. 

Let us, if needs be, exaggerate the points of agreement 
rather than the points of difference between North and 
South, East and West. The religion which we practise 
began in an Eastern country ruled by a Western people, 
and was preached by an Eastern trained in Eastern tradi- 
tions, in a Western city full of Eastern superstitions ; the 
line between East and West is a real line, but it is perpetu- 
ally being overpassed, and the notion that it is not a line, 
but a wall, a barrier unsurmountable, is an idea sprung 
from that English habit of mind that finds it so difficult 
to respect a people that has been conquered. 

The tomb of Durandus guards the Caraffa Chapel, whose 
walls Filippino Lippi painted to the glory of God in honour 
of Thomas of Aquinum. It is a beautiful accident that has 
given the most childlike of the Italian painters the work of 
commemorating the most intellectual of the Western 
theologians. One can imagine how Michael Angelo, with 
his flamelike concepts and his architectonic skill, would 
have built up some stupendous memorial to the doctor of 



120 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE 

the Summa Theologia, or how Leonardo would have 
thrown over the clear, maplike theology of S. Thomas that 
incomparable haze, that splendour of mystical beauty 
which writes the whole of Christian theology in the curve 
of Madonna's lips, or the grip of the Bambino's hands. 
Filippino Lippi does what we may believe S. Thomas 
would have preferred. He represents, not the great doctor 
of the Church, but the humble religious who by God's grace 
has been able to reveal to the brethren something of the 
truth of the Gospel. If you take the main fresco, the Dis- 
puta, what do you find ? No glorification of intellectual 
ability, no glowing commentary on the mystical value of 
Catholic theology, but plain, simple statements that might 
apply to any who repeat the Creed. Two little angels, 
those chubby angels of Lippi's, who always seem to be 
whispering to the children, " Wouldn't you like to be one 
of us ? ", hold an inscription : " The opening of Thy words 
giveth light : it giveth understanding to the simple." S. 
Thomas himself holds a book on which are written the 
words of the Apostle of the Gentiles : " I will destroy the 
wisdom of the wise." And below him are the symbolic 
figures of old heresies, Arius and Sabellius and Averrhoes, 
representing that pride which is the strength and shame of 
Islam. The whole fresco is emblematic of the foolishness 
of God which shall confound the wise. It is the reiteration 
of that " high humility " which knows that out of the 
mouths of babes and sucklings praise is perfected, which 
preaches a Gospel which is foolishness to the Greeks. 

At the entrance to the choir, on the north side, is the 
statue of Our Lord, ordered from Michael Angelo in 15 14, 
by Bernardo Cenci, Mario Scappacci and Martello Vari : 
the price was two hundred ducats. The master did not 
finish his work on the statue till 1520, and then it was sent 
to Rome to be finally " touched up " by a pupil, Pietro 
Urbano. It is not surprising that the statue fails to satisfy 



ROME AT CHURCH 121 

one. The bronze drapery has, of course, been added by 
some vandals, like those who perched the wretched little 
angels over the head of Our Lady of the Pieta ; but apart 
from that, in this one work Michael Angelo seems to have 
been doubtful of his purpose. We cannot put much more 
down to the credit of Pietro Urbano ^ than the rather 
modish finish which is so uncharacteristic of Buonarroti's 
own work ; for the idea and composition of the statue the 
master must be held responsible. The tradition that calls 
it '' The Risen Christ " is old and quite trustworthy, but 
a critical mind will hasten to find some other name for the 
statue. Our Lord is represented holding to the cross, 
from which His head is turned away, looking not up, as 
one might expect, nor straight in front, but rather down- 
wards, as if towards the tomb He has abandoned. There 
is a look of weariness about the face, almost a kind of 
boredom, a lack of dignity which is singularly untypical of 
Michael Angelo, and peculiarly unsuitable to the subject. 
By far the most beautiful parts of the statue are the arms 
and hands ; and the long fingers of the right hand, which 
rest on the cross, recall the hand of the " David." The whole 
arrangement of the statue, except possibly the firm pose 
of the feet, suggest to me a Christ starting on the Way of 
Sorrows rather than a Christ bursting from the bonds of 
death. There is no exaltation, no joy, no movement ; 
nothing but a placid subjection, an almost hopeless expec- 
tation of some ineluctable doom. 

^ Or to Roderigo Frizzi, who also had a hand in -- finishing ' ' the 
statue. 



CHAPTER VI 

OUTSIDE ROME 

WHAT is the Campagna ? It is not a question I 
can answer. I have Hved in the middle of those 
Cornish moors that stretch all the way, disdaining the 
few roads thereon, from Penzance to S. Ives. They are 
full of a certain uncanny, but not unfriendly, life. I know 
and love the deceitful levels of the hills, which as you look 
at them seem good walking, and when you approach 
nearer become nothing but gorse-bushes and rabbit-holes 
and those large boulders which were the playthings of the 
saints and the giants. Yet, however deceptive they may 
be, they are friendly, even when they are most lonesome ; 
they need winning, but they are to be won — even the 
deserted mine-shaft, or the loamy side of the clay-pit ; the 
sharp yelp of the fox and the snuffling cry of the badger 
do not terrify, but rather allure one. Life is scant, and 
scattered, but it is vivid and real ; every moor-dweller 
is quick with lively gestures, and swift speech and fiercely 
familiar action. Yet there would be some reason if the 
Cornish moors were crammed with that quality of terror 
that invades certain landscapes, for they are far from big 
towns, far from what we call civilization, and have never, 
so far as we know, been subdued by men. 

The Campagna surrounds the most ancient city in the 
Latin world ; it has seen other cities built upon it, and has 
swallowed them, inscrutably, leaving no vestige, no trace 
but a memory and a name. It is not plain or moor. It 
is rather a volcanic sea, surroimding the city of Rome ; 

122 



OUTSIDE ROME 123 

and the people who live there are as people who live in 
the sea, dejected, depressed, held by some fate to the 
perpetual service of strange gods. It is, no doubt, partly 
because we find remains of so much of the past, the early 
past — as the history of the Campagna goes — that we are so 
obsessed with the definite feeling of something that broods 
over the land ; the great company, not of dead people but 
of dead houses; of dead cemeteries, comes so suddenly on 
the imagination ; it strikes us like a wind from nowhere 
blowing, with a mortal chilliness, down the passages of 
human existence. Yet the Campagna can smile. The 
Campagna has moments when we can forget its past, 
forget a great deal of its present, and treat it as though 
it were a friendly and hospitable country, willing to be 
gracious to the traveller. 

The influence of country on man is a problem that is not 
likely to be solved in our time : I have heard some argue 
that any solution is impossible because the influence of 
the same country on different minds is absolutely different. 
The mountains that fill some of us with awe, and a sense of 
freedom, seem nothing to others but unnecessary excres- 
cences on the face of nature ; the landscape that brings 
ideas of heaven to one mind, that seems soaked in supernal 
memories, may live for another as a road to the gates of 
hell. This fact really proves that one day it may be 
possible to show that places are really saturated with some 
definite, subconscious atmosphere ; haunted, if you will, 
by the ghosts of a remembered past. If the same land- 
scape produced the same effect on all, it would show that 
there was in the landscape itself little definite character of 
its own ; one would not care for a book or a picture that 
everyone admired or admired in the same terms. It is not 
easy to express what we mean, we who believe that the 
line between the organic and the inorganic wavers, wavers 
all through the world of our experience, and at times 
breaks with a snap, a drop that can do nothing but startle 



124 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE 

and amaze. Everyone who is at all sensitive has this 
feeling that places have a soul, a personality, a something 
which, if it is not higher, is at times bigger, more massive, 
more resonant and universal than the personality of a 
man : for most people that feeling is about places bound 
into the texture of their lives, thronged with an hour, a 
day, a week, of beautiful or horrible experience, or packed 
with the most permanent memories of some inalienable 
love or hate. It is the feeling that Kingsley expressed in 
the " cruel, crawling foam " ; the feeling that all poets 
have, when they regard nature with horror-struck, or 
adoring, or sympathetic eyes ; it is the feeling which 
Ruskin in a moment of superb stupidity called the 
" pathetic fallacy." He would have it that the woman 
who curses the sea merely transplants her own over- 
fierce sorrow and ascribes it to the foam, which has no 
sentience, no motive, no hate and no love. Without 
subscribing to the traditional philosophy of all primitive 
people that gives an active intelligential principle to 
places, to trees, to stones, to mountains — I assert con- 
j&dently that this old naked faith is far nearer reality 
than Ruskin's effort to put away the natural and universal 
feeling which, in stress of circumstance, clothes nature 
with will, and strength, and purposeful consciousness. 
The certainty which makes some of us give distinct 
qualities, distinct character, and definite personality to 
inorganic things has just the same validity as the certainty 
that prevents us from being sophists, that drives us into 
allowing reality to our fellow-creatures ; and indeed I 
believe modern science here upholds the poet, and even 
materialism cannot remove this belief, unless someone can, 
by some hitherto unobserved process, prove that matter 
is anything else than the manifestation of spirit. 

While the ordinary man sees this personality only in 
the natural objects which are, to him, vivid and full of 
experience, poets and those who have the imaginative 



OUTSIDE ROME 125 

temperament will find it in everything. We are quite 
removed from that pantheistic position which makes 
nature the measure of God : but we find God — that is 
reality, life — in nature just as we find Him in man ; and 
where we find life we are bound to find distinction, 
separateness, individuality. It is commonest to exercise 
this feeling about towns ; it is easy, comparatively, to 
evoke and make dynamic the curiously vivid quality of 
cities — they are more quickly grasped and held, they 
yield a secret, even if it is not their own peculiar secret, to 
all who approach them with wit and reverence. 

With the country it is different. It is easy to find, if 
we look, not a definite consciousness, not a separable 
personality, but that genuine and vague feeling of some- 
thing that beats and pulses behind the smallest stone, the 
tiniest flower, or that whispers in the bowed movement of 
the grass. We can repeat with a real truth of feeling : 

" Elder father, though thine eyes 
Shine with hoary mysteries, 
Canst thou tell what in the heart 
Of a cowsUp blossom Hes ? 

Smaller than all seeds that be, 
Secret as the deepest sea, 
Stands a little house of seeds 
Like an elfin granary. 

Speller of the stones and weeds, 
Skilled in Nature's crafts and creeds, 
Tell me what is in the heart 
Of the smallest of the seeds ! 

God Almighty and with Him 
Cherubim and Seraphim, 
Filling all Eternity, 
Adonai, Elohim ! -' 

But it should be possible, and it very frequently is, to 
go on from that to the discernment, not only in small 



126 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE 

things, but in great, of a distinct form of consciousness. 
What we mean by individuahty is, I suppose, that quality 
in a person or a thing which, apart from our own wills, 
impinges upon our minds with such force and directness 
that ever afterwards that person or thing is inseparable 
from that impression. Of course one can make mistakes. 
People of a conceited and dull temperament too often 
determine beforehand the position and character of those 
persons or places whom they are going to meet ; and they 
go ludicrously astray in estimating the truth of character. 
They cannot even attempt to see others except as part 
of some large external whole, something not themselves, 
that matters only as it bears on and influences their own 
lives. 

A capital instance of mistaken judgment is Matthew 
Arnold's estimate of Oxford. For him Oxford is the home of 
lost causes and forsaken beliefs, and of impossible loyalties ; 
she is dreaming among her gardens, and whispering from her 
towers lost enchantments of the Middle Ages. A stranger 
would have the impression of a city and a society alike 
confounded with some Epicurean heaven of light divinity 
and easy ethics : a society where nothing interested save 
what was past, where nothing intrigued one save what 
was dead and embalmed, where nobody was enthusiastic 
except in carving and adorning the details for neglected 
temples and the tombstones of forgotten prophets. And 
you go to Oxford and you find yourself in the midst of the 
most sceptical, the most inquiring, the most active, the 
most aggressive society in England. You can escape from 
the chatter of social problems only to fall into the whirlpool 
of science and theology ; you can leave theology and find 
yourself reading, with undergraduates, French poets 
whom Paris has scarcely heard of and London never ; or 
you can discuss with those undergraduates the position in 
art of masters whose very names are unheard elsewhere. 
Ten years or more ago Oxford was discussing Gauguin, 



OUTSIDE ROME 127 

van Gogh and van Toorop and Fernand Khnopff ; Oxford 
knew all about Nietzsche and Shaw and Butler and Chester- 
ton — I don't mean that this excessive modernity is all 
good, but it exists, and, except for that terrible Hanoverian 
epoch when England gave up thought and took to ration- 
alism, nearly always has been the prevailing note of our 
oldest university. Matthew Arnold was a dreamer, he 
was eager to defend lost causes — such as the reputation of 
Napoleon ; he was chivalrous to the verge of Quixotry in 
fighting for impossible loyalties, such as the ethical- 
emotional view of religion — and so he gave these qualities 
to the city on the Isis, to whom he was bound by so many 
and so powerful bands of love and devotion. And if a 
great poet and a great artist, like Matthew Arnold, went 
wrong, through personal prejudice, in describing a city 
he knew and loved so well, how much more danger is there 
that I shall go astray in attempting to catch the spirit of 
the Campagna ? 

So I admit beforehand that my feeling about the 
character of the Campagna may be woefully wrong : 
but it is too definite and certain for me not to put it down. 
I love Rome so much that I may do her mother some 
injustice. I feel about the Campagna what I definitely 
denied about Rome, that she is like the Boyg in Peer 
Gynt. I remember wondering how Ibsen could have 
written a poem so full of Northern colouring and feeling, 
in spite of a few beautiful glimpses of desert and sun and 
warmth, in such a city as Rome. How was it that the 
greatest city in the world had so little effect on a young 
man of so gorgeous a capacity for fancy, so striking and 
prodigal an imagination ? Then when I saw the Cam- 
pagna — or rather when I thought over the Campagna — 
I realized that Ibsen had not left the Rome of his sojourn 
out of the play that he wrote there. The Boyg is that 
force with which Peer Gynt fights, the force that refuses 
to fight, that wins by waiting and yielding, by never 



128 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE 

striking back, by nothing save a grim, uncanny, ghastly 
inertia. And that is the secret of the Campagna. She 
does not strive ; her volcanic powers are asleep and quiet. 
Long centuries ago the sea swayed quietly through her 
coves and inlets, the whole of her kingdom looked much as 
the Greek Archipelago looks to-day ; then there came some 
hostile force, and the slow, enormous body of her moved 
and shook, and the sea was swallowed, beaten, baffled ; and 
then rose up Monte Cimino, and all the craters by Lago 
Bracciano, and the smiling, fertile mountains of Lago 
Alba. That was the beginning of the Campagna. Since 
then she has swallowed up cities and civilizations, Etruscan 
and Latin, and still she waits. Outside the gates of the 
city she lies, quiet, at times vaguely threatening, more 
often vaguely bland and amiable, but always expectant, 
certain, secure, knowing that her day will come, that Rome 
will be hers as Veii was hers, and the dear soil of Latium. 
And it is this, is it not, which excuses and explains Rome's 
aggressive and arrogant pride of place and position. 
Before such an enemy the strongest character, unless weak- 
ness and torpor be allowed to supervene, must keep up a 
bold front, a high and haughty courage. While that is 
preserved, Rome is still safe. And I will not say that the 
Campagna is right. I will not say that Rome must for 
certain be hers. But I am sure that the Campagna is 
enormously positive as to her ultimate victory ; that she 
dreams of many things, of the long lines of the dead, of 
the shattered houses, the broken columbaria, the flying feet 
of beaten Etruscans, the splendid rush of Caesar, the chariots 
of Imperial Rome, the flight and return of Peter — that she 
dreamis of and smiles at the small towns and villages which 
presume to be happy surrounded by her wonder, and 
forgetful upon her breast, but that she never dreams of 
defeat. Yet — yet — even so fought the Boyg, and at the 
end the Boyg was vanquished. In that last gasp of life 
the great unresisting, conquering force shrivelled up, 



OUTSIDE ROME 129 

when the bells rang out, and the prayers of Solveig and 
Ase rose to heaven, shrivelled up, with the whispered, 
choking confession : 

" He was too strong. There were women behind him." 

So may it be with Rome ! May the ringing bells, and 
the prayers of Mary, and Francesca and Catherine, and all 
the saints avail against that creeping, damping, slimy, 
horrible death which comes out of the Campagna and 
threatens not only Rome material but Rome religious and 
spiritual. The enemy of the Church is not the open and 
avowed foe, but the contemptuous and indifferent, the 
calmly secure, the folk who do not take the trouble to 
fight, who seem so harmless, and who spread the numbing 
paralysis of death. 

It was late one evening in January that we felt — at 
least I am not sure that Dominic felt it so strongly — this 
astonishing grasp, this hold, unstraining, definite, perman- 
ent, that the Campagna has upon Rome. We had been 
for a walk outside the walls. First we went into that 
amazing basilica where the body of S. Paul lies. I know 
nothing in Rome that shows her strength so much as this 
huge building : here, on the site of the old church, burnt 
down in 1823, Rome of the nineteenth century has put up 
a temple that will compare well with the greatest efforts 
of her past. We entered the cathedral by a door on the 
north side, and as we looked across the huge space of the 
transept it seemed as though we were already in the main 
body of the building. Then we walked on, and found 
ourselves behind the High Altar, gazing at the beautiful 
Paschal Candlestick which is one of the things saved 
from the fire, and one of the most precious treasures left us 
from the Rome that had begun to assimilate the Gothic. 
The nave with its clean severity, its unbroken continuity of 



130 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE 

line, is to my mind one of the grandest in Rome. It curi- 
ously suits, not, perhaps, so much the character of S. 
Paul as what S. Paul has stood for in Christian theology. 
It has all the intellectual rigidity, the beautiful line of 
Pauline theology ; and when you get into the cloisters, 
with their charming curled columns, you are in the 
atmosphere of those Pauline epistles, which combine so 
amazingly ingenuity and strength, argument and truth, 
plausibility and reality. 

We had an introduction to one of the brothers of the 
Benedictine convent which serves San Paolo. He had just 
come out from Nones when we rang the bell, and was quick 
in his welcome. He took us along the corridors where is 
preserved the fine series of papal portraits from S. Peter 
to Innocent I. He took us into his cell, not very severe, 
more indeed like a room in a college than a cell in a con- 
vent ; a modification in which, we must remember, the 
present-day monks are only following the spirit of Bene- 
dict's rule, which was an attempt to secure a religious life 
less austere than that of the Fathers of the Desert or the 
anchorites of the Pillar. He asked us questions about 
English life and religion, shrewd and sensible questions ; 
and we signed our names in a little visitors' book that he 
had. Then came a curious experience. We were parti- 
cularly anxious to see the library, one of the finest in 
Rome. Could he manage it for us ? Oh yes ; there 
would be no difficulty about that. So off we went in 
search of the librarian. We found him seated in a chair 
in the ante-room of the library. We were introduced, and 
received with great ceremony and courtesy. We con- 
gratulated him on being the guardian of so many and so 
beautiful books : it would be a privilege if we could see 
them. Would it be possible ? 

" But yes, you may see the books any time. They are 
beautiful — beautiful illuminations; when the sun strikes 
on them they are wonderful." 



OUTSIDE ROME 131 

He made, however, no motion to rise, and our friend 
said something to him in ItaHan that I did not catch. 

Risking all my reputation for politeness, I charged in. 

" Could we see the books now ? " 

*' Oh, of course, it is possible ! But they are more 
beautiful in the morning, when the sun shines. If you 
will come in the morning " 

I explain that we have only a short time in Rome, and 
that it is not likely we can get out so far again. 

'* Ah ! but the morning is the best time. You will see 
them better." 

" We would rather " — at this moment a lay-brother 
walked into the room and stood waiting in a corner — " see 
them now, if you could show them to us." 

" You had better come on a morning ; yes, you will 
come in the morning." 

It was evidenth^ hopeless, and we turned to go ; our 
friend was obviously furious and kept silence with diffi- 
culty. We paid our adieux with the greatest respect, and 
began to leave the room. As we left I turned round. 
The lay-brother had already got a napkin tucked under 
the librarian's chin, and was beginning to lather him. So 
that was the secret. It was the librarian's hour for 
shaving, and he would not let it pass for any forestieri who 
wanted to see his books. " Ye-e-es, you will come in the 
morning. Good-a-bye." Well, perhaps one day we will 

There was another little incident in that monastery 
which was rather pathetic. We were taken into the 
chapter-house where the brothers met ; beyond that was 
the chapel of the convent. Would we like to see it ? 
" Please," we answered. So Dom Anselmo — we will call 
him — went on, and paused at the door of the chapel. Then 
with ever so hesitant and affecting a gesture^-a gesture 
that said, " You are English ; I have not asked your 
religion ; but most English have a strange religion and 



132 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE 

do not seem to understand Christian habits " — he offered 
me holy water. I took it with a " grazias/' and he turned 
with great swiftness to Dominic, who received it hkewise ; 
and as the three of us genuflected to the Presence over the 
altar Dom Anselmo looked, and, I believe, felt, a quite 
genuine happiness. He must have been rebuffed, or seen 
others rebuffed so often, that he had begun to consider 
whether it was worth while to go on with that beautiful 
act of initiation, the use of lustral water. I have never 
understood the lines of the objection to holy water. Its 
use is so eminently scriptural, so thoroughly in accord 
with the sacramental principle, so remarkably consonant 
with the sacrament of baptism, that I always wonder 
that any Christian body should have abandoned it. It is 
a small thing, of course, but so is uncovering the head on 
entering a place of worship. And the idea of water as a 
purifying symbol is more universal than uncovering the 
head as a sign of reverence. After all, the Jews and 
Mohammedans worship covered ; in the Catholic Church 
the bishop and abbot wear the mitre ; during Divine 
worship some sit, some stand, some kneel, some lie pros- 
trate : but in all ages, among all peoples, water is the sign 
of cleansing. And surely to any Christian to have holy 
water at the entrance to the church is a very simple and 
beautiful symbol. Just as baptism is the means and 
symbol of our reception into the Church of God ; by it 
our sins are removed and our uncleanness purged ; so at 
our going into the material church we sign ourselves with 
holy water in recollection of our baptism, and as a pledge 
to keep ourselves clean from sin. 

Of course I don't believe that the people who had 
rebuffed Dom Anselmo in the past had done it from any 
reason of bigotry or bitterness, but simply from ignorance 
of what his appeal meant ; but it is odd, isn't it, that the 
memory of so simple a custom should have deserted those 
of the English who are not Catholics ? 



OUTSIDE ROME 133 

When we left S. Paolo we went along the Via delle Sette 
Chiese — the old pilgrim road — to S. Sebastiano, where we 
descended ad catacumbas ; then we looked at the church, 
not one of great interest apart from the associations of its 
patron and of the Apostles. It was in this church that the 
most debonair of saints, Philip Neri, used to spend the night 
in prayer. It was here that, on the eve of Pentecost, he 
received that strange mark of Divine favour, when the 
globe of fire came down from heaven and appeared to enter 
his body, by the heart. Rising after his trance Philip 
found a swelling on his left side, and was troubled with a 
curious palpitation of his heart. No doubt science can 
explain this, as it can explain the sweet savour of S. 
Theresa's corpse, and the further fact that, after S. Philip's 
death, two of his ribs were found to have been forced 
apart. But we believe that, whatever physical explana- 
tion can be given, the happenings in S. Sebastiano were 
symbolic of the fervour of that heart of his which was so 
sorry for sinners, so stern with sin, and so full of consolation 
for the penitent. 

When we left the church we went along the Appian 
Way towards the tomb of Cae cilia Metella. What is it that 
charms us about the Roman roads ? It is not their 
directness, their straightness, their determination of 
aspect, for you have these qualities in the roads that run 
through the land of France, and they do not move me to 
any feeling save that of cold admiration of their skill, and 
of horror at the ideal which is so determined to neglect 
the incidental, and make straight for — what ? A city 
to be conquered, a people to be enslaved, a town to be 
oppressed. The Roman road seems to have more purpose, 
more loftiness of character : it is more decently subordi- 
nated to the towns and villages which it connects. In 
France one has a feeling that the hamlets belong to the 
road, are but kept alive to feed the monstrous stream of 
modern traffic that flies along the flint way : the Roman 



134 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE 

road is the servant of the people, the servant even of the 
shepherd and his dog, of the beggar and his sores — the 
courteous, dignified servant of even such foreign pilgrims 
as were Dominic and I. And about the Via Appia there 
is an especial atmosphere of service. After we had looked 
at the great tomb, it was getting towards sunset. We had 
each, I rather scoffingly, brought overcoats, which had been 
a great nuisance to us in the warm January sun : we put 
them on now, grumbling a little at the tradition, and 
started to walk back. Quite suddenly the sun fell. In 
Italy the sun does not leave the earth with that lingering 
benediction we are used to in England; it does not set, sink- 
ing slowly, reluctantly, into the warm, rose-coloured clouds, 
faintly tinged with green, the green of jade, as you may see 
it setting on the Cornish coast ; it does not glow, red, hazy, 
beautiful, and then gradually withdraw, a massy ball of 
fire. Instead of that, at the time of the Angelus, when the 
bell rings out over the city, some unseen and unavoidable 
hand plucks the sun out of the sky and drops it behind 
the swell of the Campagna. The sun is removed. And on 
that evening, when the sun was taken away, the Campagna 
began to rise. With a hideous, unhasting celerity, strange 
smells and strange whispers, and faint, distinct, scarcely 
visible wraiths of mist flew up all around us. Then it was 
I felt the special atmosphere of the Via Appia. The edge 
of the great road — the greatest road in Europe — was a 
kind of rampart against the maleficent power of the Cam- 
pagna. For a time it seemed as though we could watch, 
without being hurt by, the gradual growth from the 
plains ; then, as we walked ever quicker and quicker, 
the Campagna began to win. Its influence crept round 
our feet : chilly, ever so languidly apprehending fingers, 
smoothed and fumbled at our hearts : damp, evasive, 
fluttering kisses lingered on our cheeks. Had I been alone 
I should have run. As it was, we hastened and hastened. 
I bitterly repented of and withdrew all the mockery I had 



THE TOMB OF CECILIA MKTELLA 



OUTSIDE ROME 135 

ever uttered about the Roman evening and the dangers 
of malaria. I had malaria. I could feel it in my bones 
and marrow ; every sinew and muscle was subtly affected, 
one's spirits were indescribably depressed. As we neared 
the Porta San Sebastiano the terror grew worse and worse. 
All the devils were out and eager for victims. Flittings, 
soft, decadent, like the tremulous approaches of bats, 
swayed all round us ; and steadily and strongly the whole 
soul of the Campagna, the strength, the obscene age and 
power of it beat against the city walls in the war that is 
repeated every evening : the war that may be ended one 
day, but shows no sign of cessation at present. We got 
back to our hotel just in time for dinner. 

" It does get chilly in the evening, doesn't it ? " I said 
to Dominic. 

" Yes ; let's go and wash." 

And we washed and changed and were clean from the 
horror of the Campagna. 



CHAPTER VII 

THE ROAD TO GENZANO 

THE picture I have just attempted to give of the 
Campagna is a one-sided one. Nothing perpetually 
and unchangeably presents its essential self to the specta- 
tor : the gloomiest and the grimmest things and persons 
have aspects that are positively enlivening and sunny. 
This is eminently true of the Campagna. If you go 
abroad on it, unthinking, a little heedless, a little tired of 
the stupendous strength of Rome, a little inclined to grumble 
at the fortress-like aspect of the Mother of the West, forget- 
ful that she who is the Rose of Sharon must also be terrible 
as an army with banners — you may be caught by the allure 
of the Campagna. That allure made me feel more than 
ever that the whole of the volcanic area was really still 
definitely sealike : that it was an element which natural 
man never approaches unguarded by charms and defences 
and wards, never ventures upon save when sufficiently 
embattled behind the safety of ships and canvas and 
rigging. Yet, like the sea, it has moods and moments 
when you can do nothing but play with it. With the sea 
these moments occur only, I think, when the ocean is 
perfectly still or triumphantly boisterous : on a long, hot 
day in July when the tiniest ripple just purls and purrs 
over the shallow sand and the polished pebbles, when the 
whole force of the Atlantic breaks on the beach with 
scarcely more sound than the ripple of a stream in some 
inland valley, and when the turn of tide is full of a quiet, 
sensuous peace — then one can play with the sea. And 

136 



THE ROAD TO GENZANO 137 

what else can one do but play on one of those gorgeous 
autumnal days, when the wind from the north-west — that 
friendly, quickening wind — overtakes the swiftly-running 
water and blows and thunders on its surface until the huge 
masses on top, released from the great weight below, 
break loose and dash against the grey rocks and the green 
grass, glad to meet earth, glad to lessen that eternal bond 
which binds together the huge body of Oceanus. Why, on 
such a day the sea plays with itself ! High up on the 
beach are left, not only little pools of water, but great swell- 
ing, bubbling, golden heaps of the froth that has danced 
on to land on the top of the waves : and the wind catches 
them and blows them about like drifted snow, or the flying 
feathers of some lost, enormous bird. 

That froth reminds me of the villages and cities that 
perch on the Campagna, ever so lightly. With them, on 
a day of sun and wind, one can play ; can forget the tragic 
background of disease and death and terror ; and live gaily, 
glad-heartedly, just on the surface of light life — towns like 
drifted foam ! — and one day the wind will come and beat 
and beat, and every stone and pillar of them will drop 
down into the ancient, rugged bosom of the Campagna, who 
made them in her playtime and in her playtime will destroy. 

We had two journeys in the Campagna on days when the 
Campagna smiled, and we went with a friend who seemed 
to use up all his spare time in being kind to English 
visitors at our hotel. He was not one of those tiresome 
people who know exactly what you want to do, and how 
you want to do it ; who remove from you your own wills 
and minds and plans and purposes and give you in exchange 
something infinitely more tiring and less amusing. No ; 
he had real ideas. He had lived in Rome for years. He 
did know what one ought to do — it was he who sent us to 
San Anselmo, and it was he who said, " You must have at 
least two excursions into the country." I know he wouldn't 



138 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE 

like to be thanked by name here, so I will just thank him, 
and call him Hislop, a name that has quite suddenly and 
for no evident purpose sprung into my mind. When he 
said to Dominic and me that we must go a country walk 
we wondered where. We discussed possibilities, among 
them Hadrian's villa at Tivoli. But I had had enough of 
Hadrian ; so we decided against Tivoli. We were still 
uncertain when one morning Hislop came and asked us : 
" Would you like to go to Nemi and Genzano, and drink 
the good red wine ? " It seemed an excellent plan, for my 
slight readings in anthropology and folklore made me keen 
to see Nemi ; and also Dominic and I were both anxious 
to drink the Campagna wine, the wine so gracious and so 
subtle and delicate that it will not bear transferring from 
the hills to Rome. 

We started off by tram. What an astonishing thing a 
Roman tram is ! Dominic, who had a positive genius for 
getting his bearings quickly and correctly in foreign places, 
was all right on foot in Rome after a day or two — but the 
trams ! Even I noticed that their sense of direction seemed 
rather perverted. You could, for instance, when you left 
the hotel in the Via Tritone, go to S. Peter's in the Vatican 
by two entirely different tram-routes. This perhaps is not 
so odd ; but when one has said that these two routes went 
in exactly opposite directions, the stranger to Rome may 
begin to grasp the complexities of the Roman tram system. 
Dominic would always have it that neither of the trams 
which boasted, in large letters, of having San Pietro and 
its " fields " as a destination, ever aimed for the goal : 
that each tram started in a totally wrong way, and was 
not going towards San Pietro at all. The fact that they 
ever got there was an amazement to him : he used, as we 
sat in the creatures, to look anxiously at the landmarks 
and notice nervously how many entirely unnecessary 
streets the tram would wander down before it came near 
turning in the right direction. 



THE ROAD TO GENZANO 139 

Then when we met and passed a tram that was also 
going to San Pietro he would give the affair up as hopeless, 
and murmur no gentle words about the Syndic and his myr- 
midons. I like to think myself that the tramway system 
in Rome was inaugurated, planned, built and blessed by 
the cabdrivers ; I noticed that scarcely any forestieri used 
the trams but ourselves. Occasionally we met an American 
woman, rather vaguely determined about her destination, 
and possibly dreaming that she was on the Inner Circle in 
London, or on the District — lines of which the Roman 
tramways faintly remind me. But the trams, on the whole, 
are used by the populace — used for chatting purposes, 
and to encourage the conductor, who is a family friend, or 
to enrage the clericals, or to keep warm, and incidentally to 
get from one street to another. The trams are called in 
the guide-book " electric," and it is true there is no 
other visible method of propulsion : but they do not 
swagger about electric power in Rome. They use it, and 
I daresay like it — in moderation. The trams are small, 
jumpy little fellows not unlike those antiquarian toys that 
bump and sway from Carfax to Summertown : and they 
are meant to hold, as a rule, about thirty odd people. They 
rarely started, so far as I noticed, till they had about fifty 
on board. We learnt in time not to get in early if we were 
mounting a tram at a terminus. That would mean we 
should ^tt a seat, which is pleasant ; but it would 
also mean that, unless we expected supernatural inter- 
ference, we should remain in the seat until the next ter- 
minus. They hate wasting space, do the Roman tram 
authorities. 

When a tram has got its full complement of travellers 
seated inside, and also its full number of smokers standing 
round the driver and conductor, in the charming Contin- 
ental way, the driver begins to think that he is going to have 
a good morning of it. He pats his car and consults with 
the conductor : it is not more than ten minutes after the 



140 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE 

advertised time of starting, and both ridicule the idea of 
going yet. Besides, there are hardly any people in the 
tram. More come : some are wedged in, squeezing into 
seats, on people and baskets and little dogs — which are not 
allowed ; then a few more men come, going presumably to 
some kind of business. They stand on the smokers' plat- 
form. Gradually the platform at the conductor's end is 
holding about twice as many men as it should : so the new 
arrivals squeeze in somehow, wade and push through the 
tram, open the door at the end, and join the little company 
who are keeping the driver warm. Of course they might 
have gone straight to his platform ; but this would have 
shown an uninquiring spirit, a dull, methodical temper. 
The conductor looks round and smiles happily. Then 
he pushes and wades through the tram and has another 
little conference with the driver. Then there is a groaning, 
and a squeaking, and a swaying, and the tram prepares 
ever so cautiously to start. Suddenly a cry is heard ; the 
driver gladly applies his brakes, while the tram is going 
at the pace of about one mile in four hours, and allows a 
fat Franciscan friar, and a stout old woman with a large 
basket, to add themselves to the company. At last a 
serious start is made ; the pace quickens to a mile an hour, 
and from a discreet corner where we have been watching 
the preliminaries Dominic and I come out, and, to the 
enormous admiration of the other travellers, board the 
tram while it is in motion and stand securely on the foot- 
board, the only place from which egress is comparatively 
simple. 

For the latter part of our journey to Nemi, however, we 
went — from the gates of the city — up to Rocca di Papa in 
one of the new trainlike trams. Thence we started to 
walk to Nemi, where are the sunken galleys of Tiberius ; 
and in whose grove, of old days, was the Temple of Diana. 

It was a glorious day ; a cool wind blew and just tem- 
pered the rays of the sun that was driving down and 




ITALIAN SOLDIER 



THE ROAD TO GENZANO 141 

melting the ice that was still caked on the roads. We 
took off our coats, and paced along the road, which even 
in Hislop's memory was supposed to be dangerous from 
brigands — the name by which custom and courtesy 
dignify the Italian footpad. We met nothing more alarm- 
ing than three little girls, the eldest of whom was sucking 
an enormous icicle that she had broken off from under the 
overhanging cliff. It is a good broad road up to Monte 
Cavo, and on the way we passed a little church. Hislop, 
who is a good, though rather — what shall I say ? — 
" familiar " Catholic, was for passing it, but Dominic and I 
reminded him that we were strangers, and persuaded him to 
go in. It was a dark, ugly little building, and on the walls 
were pictures more reminiscent of transpontine melodrama 
than of anything religious. One represented a child being 
saved from imminent death — I forget whether it was from 
fire or from a runaway horse — but the artist had contrived 
to cram into the picture a general atmosphere of tragic 
disaster, of universal destruction, red death, and sudden 
terror. It was a votive picture and was put up in thanks- 
giving for a child's life by two grateful parents. The chapel 
was dedicated in the name of Our Lady of the Tufa in 
honour of a miraculous image which was found in the tufa 
at an uncertain date. The story is characteristic of a 
certain kind of legend, and is worth giving : 

One day a man was travelling along the road above the 
Lago Albano, looking at the clear beauties of the water 
and happily singing on his way into Rome. Suddenly he 
heard a threatening sound, and, turning round, he saw a 
huge mass of rock lava which had broken away from the 
grey sides of Monte Cavo, tearing and rolling and bouncing 
down to the exact spot where he was. It was scarcely 
twelve yards away. The traveller stood, horror-struck : 
he could go neither backwards nor forwards. Death 
seemed certain. Then breathlessly, swiftly, he appealed 
to Our Lady. The rock rolled on, unrelenting, and then. 



142 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE 

with a quickness that was as sudden as the stroke of death, 
stopped, imminent, huge — but stopped, and the man was 
saved. He went on his way rejoicing and told of the 
miraculous escape he had had. As usual people doubted, 
scoffed, explained. " The wine of Albano was heady," 
*' The sun was strong," ** Yes, and we suppose you had a 
vision too," " Are you sure it was not the whole of Monte 
Cavo that came down on you ? " 

" Come and see, see where," cried the enraged man, 
" Mary helped me." 

A few began to follow him. Then more. He leads them 
up the road, and stands at the spot, and points triumph- 
antly at the new configuration of the hillside, at the naked 
ground, the rent grass, and, afar off, the wound on Monte 
Cavo. " Ecco ! " 

Doubt gives way to surprise. It is curious : very 
curious. Certainly something has happened. They pry 
about in the ground ; a few, greatly daring, begin to poke 
at the vast rock that lies sullen, thwarted, half buried in 
the mountain side. There is a cry of warning. A slow, 
grating, grinding noise follows. The people rush away, 
affrighted, chattering, full of prayers and penitence : 
doubts fly to the wind. Still the noise goes on, a great 
rending crash follows, and the rock splits asunder. What 
is this new miracle ? What can it mean ? They push the 
traveller forward. It is his hour : it is his miracle. He 
must investigate. He goes forward, humbly, anxiously, 
overwrought. A wild cry, of rapture, of amazement, of 
anguished joy, burst from him. *' Ah ! see, see ! Our 
Dear Lady herself ! " There in the middle of the rock, 
plainly to be seen on one of the fragments, is a picture of the 
Blessed Mother of God. Cries and hymns of praise greet 
the new miracle, and the traveller thanks Mary for thus 
attesting the truth of his story. Soon a church is built on 
the spot — now served by the Mercedarii, the Religious of 
the Order of Ransom, who came here from Rocca di Papa 



THE ROAD TO GENZANO 143 

— and as a modern Jesuit puts it : " Whatever be the origin 
of the picture, it is very miraculous as the numerous ex- 
votos hanging in the church attest." 

Is it wrong to be rather tender towards legends of that 
kind ? There are people whom the whole atmosphere of 
the miraculous annoys terribly ; they cannot away with 
the least thing that smacks of superstition, if the super- 
stition be connected with religion. They will obey the 
ordinary superstitions of ordinary life, but despise the 
gentle, less rational side of popular religion. I think they 
are wrong. I have no patience with relics frankly false, 
of which there are far too many, and none with feigned 
miracles; but with the ancient mentality — to use a disgust- 
ing word — that clothes natural events and incidents with 
a personal character, I am thoroughly in sympathy. I 
believe in intervention. I believe in interference. I know 
I can interfere ; and I do not see why the saints should not 
interfere. Life only progresses by interferences. Machin- 
ery is useful — but generally only becomes really valuable 
in helping life when it breaks down and we are forced to 
remember that there is a power behind the machine, that 
there is a god in the car. " The law of the uniformity of 
nature " is a grand phrase, and very little else : it ignores 
the men who made the phrase, and the personality of the 
people who use it ; it should belong only to the deter- 
minist who uses his will to deny will and condones the 
opinions he condemns by the mere fact of utterance. 

I don't knovv^ where the picture in the Church of Madonna 
del Tufa comes from ; nor does anyone else. But this I 
know, that whatever of false or foolish may be mixed in 
the legend, to this truth at least it testifies : that there is 
a bond greater than law, a unity higher than nature's, a 
force too real to be impersonal. It testifies that above 
and beyond appearance there is the real, helpful, eternal 
relationship between the departed and the living, between 



144 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE 

men and angels, between Mary and her children, between 
Jesus and His disciples, between God and His creatures. 
Every ugly little ex-voto — and most of them are hideous — 
witnesses to this, that the ultimate truth is not force, but 
love — not uniformity, but personality — not law, but 
character. And that truth is the key to the Kingdom of 
God, which, if we find, all the rest shall be added unto us. 

So in the little chapel, looking at the ugly pictures, and 
peering at the miraculous image over the altar, I was 
swept away into thoughts of the great Communion of the 
Sanctified, the immense commonalty of love which is the 
treasure of the Christian Church. In a non-Catholic 
country you might have had the traveller's escape baldly 
commemorated on a slab or an obelisk, and would have 
passed with a faint interest, possibly murmuring some 
phrase about Providence. Here the whole thing is more 
concrete. I remembered that passage in the Book of 
the Kings where the prophet displayed the wonders of 
the supernatural to his halting disciple. ** And when the 
servant of the man of God was risen early, and gone forth, 
behold an host encompassed the city, both with horses and 
chariots. And his servant said unto him, Alas, my master ! 
how shall we do ? And he answered. Fear not ; for they 
that be with us are more than they that be with them. 
And Elisha prayed, and said, Lord, I pray thee, open his 
eyes, that he may see. And the Lord opened the eyes of 
the young man ; and he saw ; and behold, the mountain 
was full of horses and chariots of fire round about Elisha." 

Every little miraculous chapel or shrine, every crucifix 
or image is one of the ways of opening our eyes " that we 
may see." They are windows into heaven, peepholes of 
the Eternal Kingdom ; and though dust and spiders' webs 
and dirt may gather round them, nay, and over them, we 
can still glimpse through the windows the flash of angels' 
wings, the blue of Mary's robe, or the royal red of the 




9?$c 




THE FRUIT OF THE CAMPAGiNA 



THE ROAD TO GENZANO 145 

wounds of Jesus, all splendidly glowing in the benignant 
light that beats from the throne of the Eternal. 

In going towards Nemi we soon struck off the road and 
took to a path across the green-clad mountains. It was 
like a warm English summer. The sky was a perfect blue, 
the sun hot and yet not oppressive, and the turf underfoot, 
luxuriant from the tufa soil, seemed another thing than 
the grass that had threatened so dankly when we rushed 
along the Appian Way. The field-path to Nemi is not too 
easy to find ; but Hislop knew it well, and we went along 
merrily and quickly. About a mile or so from the spot 
where we could look down on the lake, we caught up two 
Englishmen in perplexity. They were chaffering — or 
rather one of them was — in poor Italian with a farm- 
labourer whom they wanted to act as guide. Then he 
spied us ; he dismissed the Italian, gesticulating and pro- 
testing, and turned hastily on Hislop. 

" Do you know the way to Nemi ? " he barked. 

" Yes." 

" Well, will you kindly show us ? This man is asking 
the most extortionate sum for his services." 

We could not refuse, and so our party was increased by 
these two men. 

One was harmless, fairly dumb, and at times, I think, a 
little ashamed of his companion. The companion was 
quite one of the most offensive specimens of an offensive 
type of Englishman it has ever been my misfortune to 
meet. He was educated ; he was obstinate ; he was 
rude ; he wore a tweed suit, a bowler hat and a bright 
green tie ; he was about sixty years of age, and had 
spectacles. His politics, I should say, were hard-shell 
Liberal ; his religion may have been Calvinist or Agnostic, 
and his liver was in a rotten condition. For all the rest 
of the way he argued and disputed and dogmatized about 
the way to the lake, and what the lake was, and where 



146 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE 

the galleys were, until my patience and Dominic's were 
exhausted. We told him that Hislop had lived in Rome 
for years and knew the country round rather better than 
Green-Tie knew the wretched suburb he should never have 
been permitted to leave ; but this produced no effect. 
One might have thought that a man who had lost his way 
twice, had tried to capture the services of a casual 
labourer, and was too mean to pay for them, and had then 
appealed for help to Hislop, might have been content to 
follow. Not he. This path must be better. That one 
led to Albano and not to Nemi. And so on, to distraction. 
I was surprised at the calmness with which Hislop listened 
to and answered him ; but I think he was just pleased to 
have so odd and disagreeable a type to study, and ready 
to submit to a good deal of rudeness in order not to miss the 
opportunity. 

When we came in full view of the lake of Nemi even 
Green-Tie for a moment stayed his babble. We gazed 
down on the clear, deep water in its crater-like bed, un- 
touched by wind, undisturbed, now, by anything save 
dreams of a volcanic past. We could just see the village 
of Nemi on the other side, and below us was the '' Casa dei 
Pescatori," near which are the remains of the state barges. 

More than three times attempts have been made to 
reach these barges, but have resulted in failure alleviated 
by the discovery of some charming ornaments. It is not 
difficult to reconstruct the scenes of rather vulgar splendour 
when this grove and village and lake of Nemi were the 
favourite pleasure-places of Imperial courts. The galleys, 
which sunk some time in Caligula's reign, were possibly 
not unconnected with the worship of Diana, whose great 
temple stood in the grove adjoining ; but it is more likely 
that they belong not to the religion of primitive cruelty 
so much as to the religion of elaborate and cultured vice 
and greed, the sublimated selfishness which was the mark 
of Imperial Rome. Still over the picture of extravagance 



THE ROAD TO GENZANO 147 

and splendour come the redder tones and the more 
starthng hues of that other picture which I associate with 
Nemi. Here it was that the priest dwelt who came into his 
office by death, and yielded it by death ; he who slayed the 
slayer, and must himself be slain, was the servant of the 
goddess who ruled here. And I wondered whether the 
succession was ever accomplished in the sunshine, on such 
an afternoon as this ; when some gay, triumphant, lithe 
youth, full of devotion to Diana, fired by the lust of blood 
and pride, so much greater than all other lusts, swung 
singing through the grove to where the old priest sat, 
hugging his privileges, and challenged him, insolently, to 
the unavoidable combat. That may have happened, 
sometimes. But too often, I suspect, the one who desired 
the office was a mean, shifty man with a crooked mouth, 
and hard eyes, and a foolish mind : and he descended by 
night into the sacred grove, and crept and crept, and then 
with one blow let out his predecessor's life in a bubbling, 
choking stream. As I looked at the grove and the lake, 
I could see the picture plainly ; and suddenly the figure 
of the creeping man became like the figure of Green-Tie, 
and I felt that he had been driven, by who knows what 
obscure fate, back to the scene where years ago he had 
slunk into glory and honour through the narrow, dirty 
by-lanes of mean and secret murder. There were the hard 
eyes, and the crooked mouth, and the shallow mind ; and 
I felt that the place was bewitched, that here we were 
still in the sway of the Campagna, under the shadow of old 
religions and false faiths — demoniacal powers that were 
still prevailing. All the modern atmosphere passed away 
and we were back in the early days when the stern goddess 
Diana had just been securely enthroned in her new temple ; 
and I knew I had been at Nemi in days long dead, and had 
witnessed, from some comer in the temple, the deed that 
gave Diana a new priest and the grove a new guardian. 
The place gave me the impression, vivid, inalienable, that 



148 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE 

I had been there before ; that centuries ago, as a temple 
servant, I had seen the murder ; that I knew the old priest 
and hated, hated so desperately to serve this new creature 
with the crooked mouth and agate eyes, who had slain 
my master. 

I was roused from my imaginings by the voice of Green- 
Tie : and his voice effectually broke the spell of the place. 
He ceased to be actively malignant, the very impersonation 
of the mean slayer, and became once more the fidgety, 
argumentative, stupid Englishman that he was. 

I wish I knew why the English are so often disgusting 
in their manners abroad. Many English and Americans 
have no idea of that international courtesy which alone 
renders travelling possible and pleasant. This creature, 
for instance, was helpless, lost, definitely out of his way — 
and yet he browbeat and grumbled and complained of 
Hislop's guidance, as if he had come with us to oblige us, 
not himself. And if he behaved so to his fellow-country- 
men, what would he do with the people whom he would 
probably call " natives " or " foreigners." I remember 
an English priest — a man, it is true, of rather stupid 
character — but a man who was genuinely keen on mission- 
ary work ; he managed to secure for a special meeting the 
services of rather a distinguished Indian priest, who was 
then resident at Cuddesdon : he made a great deal of this. 
He urged people to come. He besought people not to miss 
the opportunit}^. And he asked them to come and hear 
" a native priest." And I don't believe he saw his mistake 
when it was pointed out to him. Well, it is that tendency 
of mind which becomes exaggerated on the Continent. 
The English are — well, God knows what they are, the bene- 
ficent, bounteous, god-gifted rulers of the Continent — 
and the rest are " natives," the cooking is *' native," the 
customs are '* native," and everything is indescribably 
inferior to what is found in England. And if some English 
are bad, most Americans are worse. They treat " Yurrup " 



THE ROAD TO GENZANO 149 

frankly as a museum, and the inhabitants as so many 
exhibits. One day at our hotel Dom Anselmo came to 
luncheon with us. An American girl, who had been in 
Rome a week at least, gave a glance at him as he passed 
and cried out, " My ! Mommer, look at that man in petti- 
coats ! " It seems incredible. The remark was stupid, so 
meaningless, so much the kind of remark that a London 
urchin with any taste for badinage would carefully refrain 
from making, that I could hardly believe my ears when it 
proceeded from a woman who had, presumably, enough 
education to desire to see Rome. But to her Dom An- 
selmo was just an exhibit : I daresay she thought he ought 
to be labelled. 

But I am keeping Green-Tie waiting. He had made a 
discovery. 

" I can see the sunken galleys quite plainly." 

" Really? " said Hislop. 

'' Yes ; I don't suppose you can see them. They are 
over there," and he pointed to the far end of the lake. 

" Ah ! You know," said Hislop, *' I think that is a 
reflection of the trees. I can see what you mean ; but 
this water reflects very clearly." 

Green-Tie became wordy and wordier in his assevera- 
tion that it was the barges : I fancy he would have sworn 
he could see the marble and the benches had not Dominic 
suddenly intervened. 

" I see the guide-books say that the galleys are sunk at 
the other end of the lake, just under us. Is that right, 
Hislop ? " 

" Well, I believe it is : when I saw the excavations 
they were working there." 

" Oh, nonsense, nonsense : I can see them ; guide- 
books are always wrong. How do you know, either ? " 
turning sharply to Hislop. 

''Oh, I have only walked round the lake about a dozen 
times ; and can only be certain that there was nothing 



150 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE 

where you are looking at this time last year ; but of course 
there may be now. Perhaps you had better go and look." 
At last, I thought, we shall get rid of him ; and we did. 
His companion drew Green-Tie aside, thanked Hislop, 
and we parted not amicably (on my part, at least), but 
without actual blows. 

We went on from Nemi to Genzano, and there we 
entered the Trattoria Stocchi della Grotta Azzurra. Of 
Genzano Baedeker says in his blunt, Teutonic way : " Offici- 
ally known as Genzano di Roma, the poverty-stricken 
village presents no attraction beyond its fine situation, 
high above the S.W. bank of the Lago di Nemi." 
That is not true. I'm afraid that the representative of 
Karl Baedeker was, on that trip, a teetotaller. Genzano 
produces one of the most seductive and pleasing wines that 
it has ever been my good fortune to meet. 

I am, I hope, a fairly eclectic drinker ; and I have only 
one rule. If possible, drink in each country the country's 
drink. Cider or perry in England — beer is far too chemi- 
calized for me ; Rhine wine or lager in Germany ; the gay 
clarets of France — I am happy with any of these ; and I 
confess that I was looking forward to my experience of 
Itahan wine in Rome. Alas ! Rome is a terribly poor 
place for wine. All the wine grown in the neighbourhood 
— at such places as Genzano — will not bear descending into 
the valley ; and the other wines, Chianti or Asti, are not 
much cheaper nor much better than what one can get in 
England. Still our comparative abstinence from wine in 
Rome made me the keener for meeting the hill wine in 
the hill country ; and with the first draught Green-Tie and 
all his little attendant devils flew away. 

The wine of Genzano is sweet ; it is sticky ; it is rather 
heavy — that is, it has all the qualities that I abhor in 
wine. And yet, as I sit writing this in Cornwall, I feel 
that the price of a railway ticket to Rome is not too dear 



THE ROAD TO GENZANO 151 

for a litre of it. It is a troll-wine, a wine bewitched, a 
wine enchanted and enchanting. It is wine. It is what 
poets sang of, and compared to blood ; and it is the wine 
for which strong men have bartered lands and money and 
honour. It is wine, the symbol : the wine that maketh 
glad man's heart. It is the wine of which the wise man 
said, " Look not on the wine when it is red," but drink it. 
Behind its sweetness and stickiness there is a subtle, 
elective something, a curious yet definite thrill, a volcanic 
quality which makes it a drink worth walking and waiting 
for. Hislop was cautious about it. He warned us that 
it was a deceitful wine ; but it held no traps for Dominic 
and me. We drank it confidently, with the same assur- 
ance of being at one with natural things that one can feel 
when bathing in the sea, or taking deep breaths of an 
Atlantic nor'-wester down into the very marrow of the body. 
The wine of Genzano was still reminiscent of the grape ; 
each litre was a crushed vine, a vineyard in essence. It 
was full of ruddy life, and glow, and warm memories and 
natural lives : it had nothing in common with the evil, 
swinging doors of gin palaces, or the noisy tables of 
fashionable restaurants. I felt I was drinking the drink 
of the Georgics, the drink of Horace, and that Lucretius 
might have wandered out on such a day and not despised 
a litre of the wine of Genzano. 

" Sunt Thasiae vites, sunt et Mareotides albae, 
Pinguibus hae terris habiles, levioribus illae ; 
Et passo Psithia utilior, tenuisque Lageos, 
Temptatura pedes olim vincturaque linguam ; 
Purpureae, preciaeque ; '-' 

So sang Virgil ; but better than all other wines is the 
wine of Genzano, the wine of Albano. I know how I 
would have answered Nasidienus' remark : 

**• Albanum, Maecenas, sive Falernum 
Te magis appositis delectat : habemus utrumque. '^ 



152 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE * 

He would have to have brought out his Albano ; and while 
I have no doubt Horace was always a charming host, and a 
good fellow, and popular with all — except, perhaps, some 
few fiery poets — yet I am sure that he knew what he was 
about when, in sending out his invitation to Phyllis, he 
put in the forefront of the advantages to be had : 

*' Est mihi nonum superantis annum 
Plenus Albani cadus ! -' 

Our other walk took us more into the heart of the low- 
lying parts of the Campagna. We left the city by the gate 
of San Giovanni, and went along the old Via Latina that 
runs from Rome to Capua. We struck off the Via Latina, 
not far from where it intersects with the Via Appia Nuova, 
and proceeded to walk across the plains to the Via Appia. 
We ought, of course, to have gone along the Strada Militare; 
but this Hislop would have nothing of. He struck across 
the country, and before we had been off the road for ten 
minutes it seemed as though we were miles away from 
any human dwellings, from any friendly people. Quite 
suddenly I heard singing ; before I could speak, Dominic 
said : 

" Look there, Ellis, how absurdly like the drop-curtain 
at the Oxford Theatre." 

Some of my readers may remember that old drop- 
scene. It portrayed an Italian peasant — always to our 
mind grossly theatrical, with one foot so out of drawing as 
to look diseased, playing on a pipe to some damsels ; 
behind him rose a broken aqueduct, and the whole painting 
was intended to give you a feeling of sunlight. Well, 
there w^as the aqueduct — one of those insolent aggressions 
on the Campagna's pride which she has broken and whose 
ruins she preserves — and there was the shepherd, absurdly 
and grotesquely like the shepherds in popular pictures. 
He had no damsels, it is true ; but he had a dog like a 
wolf, and a sheepskin flung over his shoulders ; and though 




iiAl.iAX i'KA.^AM i W U.MAN 



THE ROAD TO GENZANO 153 

he was not playing on his pipe, I am sure he had one some- 
where : at the moment he preferred to sing, His singing, 
too, had an abrupt theatrical appropriateness ; it was 
neither good nor bad — but high, monotonous and suitable 
to the tone of the great plain where he lived. The Cam- 
pagna had conquered him : he was her slave, and he sang 
dreary songs in praise of the mistress who had chosen him. 
As we approached he made no sign of greeting ; and a low 
growl, followed by a fusillade of snappy barks, from his 
white dog, met with no comment or rebuke. Hislop shouted 
out a " good-day " but the shepherd did not cease from his 
singing. He who was slave to the Campagna had no words 
for the stranger from the rebel city who still holds out 
against the dull, persistent force that surrounds and would 
swamp her. 

*' Long avenues of aqueducts sweep grey across the broken green 
Where nought of Man is ever seen save the great tombs that love 
constructs 

To stay awhile the feet of Death, hold back the great and heavy 

hand 
That not a Caesar can withstand, that no King ever conquereth. 

But here amid the fetid grass, when the low vapours rise and swirl 
And phantom figures lightly curl around the steps of those that 
pass, 

We feel the Mother-God of Hell, the Queen of death and bright 

decay 
Here holds upon her horrid way, and here alone elects to dwell. 

Here is the ancient, royal house, the Great Campagna, slow and 

sure 
Whose loves for evermore endure, whose bays are deathless on her 

brows. 

Cities of old and citizens have sunk into her greedy mouth ; 
From east and west and north and south her winds blow doom, 
gods' doom, and men's ; 



154 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE 

Yet beyond all abides a home ; from column, shrine and colonnade 
Jesus and Mary to our aid offer the kingly walls of Rome. 

Offer the haughty walls of Rome, where above tow'r and pinnacle 
The buoyant hues serenely swell of Buonarroti's perfect dome." 

One came out on the Appian Way with a sigh of relief. 
It was not that I felt the same heavy oppression that had 
pressed me down to the city gates, and beyond, on the 
evening I have written of ; but still even in the sunshine 
— for it wanted an hour or two to Ave Maria — the Cam- 
pagna held enough of hidden power, enough of that curious, 
careless strength to make the great road a harbour of 
refuge. 

There is one relic on the Appian Way that I have not 
mentioned ; that I have wondered whether I can refrain 
from mentioning. I would rather say nothing at all about 
the Domine quo Vadis, because, of all the things that I 
wanted to see, none disappointed me so much, none seemed 
so inconsistent with the story it enshrines. That story 
everyone knows ; and for our generation it has been 
retold most beautifully by a living poet, this legend of how 
" Peter turned and rushed on Rome and death." Nothing 
is more likely than that the Christian community, terrified 
and harassed by the Neronian persecution, should urge, 
nay, compel their bishop to seek a refuge somewhere out- 
side the city. The story as we have it is no older than S. 
Ambrose : but we can well believe that Peter did flee from 
Rome, and that he was met by Our Lord, walking for the 
second time the Way of Sorrows, turning the great road 
into the path from Jerusalem to Golgotha, going to Rome 
to exalt His Holy Cross : and Peter, when he received as 
answer to his cry, " Lord, whither goest Thou ? " the im- 
mortal words, " To Rome, to be crucified again," returned 
to his bishopric and martyrdom. 

But I did not feel the story any more acutely after seeing 
the little chapel that marks the traditional place of that 



THE ROAD TO GENZANO 155 

meeting ; and one's emotions are not aroused by the copy 
of the stone in which Our Lord is said to have left the 
impress of His foot. The " original " stone is at San 
Sebastiano, and is no more impressive ; the Jesuit whom I 
quoted about the picture of Madonna del Tufa says of it : 
" There is some uncertainty about the authenticity of this 
relic " — of course there is really scarcely any doubt at all 
that the relic is as unauthentic as it can well be, and for 
me, I do not know why, it and the chapel hindered instead 
of helping the Divine pathos of the incident they com- 
memorate. 



CHAPTER VIII 

ART AND ARTISTS 

IT is not to Rome among Italian cities that one goes to 
see pictures. Florence and Venice must always remain 
the two queens for the art-lover : our awe and love for 
Michael Angelo, whom to see fully you must visit Rome, 
is largely mixed with other than artistic feeling, and there 
is no other artist, save perhaps Pinturicchio and Raphael, 
whose work cannot be properly appreciated by one who 
has never been in Rome. Yet Dominic and I got a great 
deal of pleasure from the Roman picture galleries. There 
is a lot of rubbish ; there is much which, while far from 
rubbish, is disappointing ; but there is much which is full 
of an interest, a charm that nothing elsewhere quite equals. 
Often enough the charm is that of contrast. Of that we 
experienced several instances. I remember one in parti- 
cular. 

In the Doria Gallery you have one of the choicest of the 
small collections in Rome. It is choice not only by reason 
of one or two pictures ; for the rooms contain a fair if 
never very startling selection of good pictures of different 
schools. In one room you can see a good Flemish picture, 
ascribed to Matsys, four representative paintings of 
Brueghel, a Teniers and some others of the Dutch cabinet 
masters. None of these pictures is, however, so arresting 
that we would stay before it in one of the great galleries 
of Europe : they are minor examples of minor masters. 
Nor are the Italian pictures, though they include an early 
Titian and a Raphael, anything out of the ordinary. We 

156 



ART AND ARTISTS 157 

walked through the rooms, not exactly disappointed, but 
rather unmoved by the regular collection of moderate, 
sound work, unrelieved by any indubitable work of genius. 
And then I remembered : this is the home of the Roman 
Velasquez. We turn down, out of the first gallery, and 
there, in a smiting and terrible loneliness, is Pope Inno- 
cent X., Giambattista Pamfili, who reigned in Rome at the 
same time as Oliver Cromwell was ruling in England. 
There are two things obviously noticeable about the 
portrait : one is that Velasquez has, far more than is usual 
with him, allowed his own character to sweep across the 
face of his sitter. It is the only noteworthy portrait of 
Velasquez of a non-Spaniard ; and he has not been able 
to avoid putting in a quality which reminds the spectator 
of the dry heights of the Sierras, and the proud blood of the 
Castilian. Something in Velasquez revolted against the 
smooth perfection of Italian art, the sleek completeness 
of Italian masters, and he has made his paint protest, in 
colour, in mass, in line, against all the cherished conventions 
of the country in which he was sojourning. And yet there 
is in the painting another note. I can fancy that Velasquez, 
not perhaps very consciously, but still quite definitely, 
approached his subject determined to do him, as subject, 
no more reverence and attention than he would give to 
any other man. For him, Velasquez, the Holy Father 
should be, as so many peasants and kings and idiots were, 
simply material for paint : and then the character of the 
Pope accomplished what his office would never have done, 
and the result is that the Innocent X. is Velasquez's only 
** subjective " portrait. It really gives you not only what 
the painter saw, but what the painter thought. In the 
curve of the hand, in the steel-blue of that fixing and 
piercing eye you can read not only Innocent, but Velasquez ; 
as the great Spaniard went on painting, he became gradually 
and more uneasily aware that here was a man whom he 
could not deal with as he dealt with his Spanish kings, and 



158 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE 

princesses and their playthings, that here was a subject 
with which the veracity of genius was not able to cope by 
itself, and in a swift, imaginative moment, the painter gave 
us more of a portrait of a soul than he ever did before or 
since. As a rule I never feel with Velasquez the troubled 
horror that overcomes me when gazing at canvas after 
glowing canvas of a master like Rubens. In Rubens' 
painting everything is there, except the soul : Blake 
rightly put the great Fleming in hell. It is not that a 
man may not, as Sargent does to-day, content himself 
with externals : it is a legitimate form of art ; and nothing 
can be more beautiful than, say, Rubens' sketch in oils 
of a lion-cub at play . But when we find, in this same style, 
pictures which glow with life, which throb and sway with 
colour, and yet in the painter's utter failure to catch any- 
thing of the soul of his subject, are dead — might be so many 
carpet-patterns — I can never disguise my disgust. A 
sacred picture by Rubens is like a prayer-book written by 
Dumas pere. If he were frankly pagan it would not matter 
so much : but that he cannot be. He has the Christian 
atmosphere, the Christian bias, and it spoils about half his 
work. Now Velasquez, who as a master of brushwork can 
alone be named with Rubens, never gives me that feeling of 
disgust. It is, I think, because he is more serious. There 
is about a Rubens a kind of flippant air. " You want a 
Crucifixion, an Assumption ? Oh yes ! Three weeks ? 
Very well — my pupils must do a little — but it shall be 
done.'' When Velasquez was asked to paint a dwarf, I'm 
sure he answered, " I will try : I can promise nothing." 
Velasquez treated subjects almost beneath our notice with 
a high seriousness that Rubens could not give to subjects 
ineffable and consecrated by centuries of tradition. 
There is more real religion in the little Infanta at 
the Louvre, nay, in the series of dwarfs at Madrid, 
than in all Rubens' altar-pieces and sacred pictures. For 
in all Velasquez's work there is the determined purpose. 



ART AND ARTISTS 159 

not to be effective, but as far as is possible to speak the 
truth. 

And this purpose served him well when he had to paint 
Innocent. Here his devotion to external truth has opened 
for him the door to a higher truth, and he gives us a clear 
vision not only of Innocent X., not only of Giambattista 
Pamfih, but of the soul of a man. 

Ever since I had cared at all for Italian art, I had wanted 
to see that picture of Titian's which, whether it be called 
*' Sacred and Profane Love," or connected with Venus and 
Medea, remains one of the most wonderful compositions, 
one of the most beautiful arrangements in paint that can 
be found in Europe. I must confess that, apart from the 
composition, the picture rather disappointed me. It has 
been painted over, and the colour has nothing like the 
glow and passion, harmonious and thrilling, which char- 
acterize the " Bacchus and Ariadne." It has some of the 
mysteriousness of those beautiful Giorgiones which as a 
rule the catalogue is forced to describe as " figures in a 
landscape," but it has, at the same time, a certa '.1 enhance- 
ment of actuality, a more definite feeling for truth than 
the best of Giorgione. Giorgione, I feel, is generally 
painting people in a land that no one ever saw, and painting 
them with a difference, very slight and yet perceptible 
enough, from the people of real life : I mean his work 
passes from poetry into fiction, from imagination into 
fantasy — there is a quality in it that might almost be 
called " insincerity " if the painter were not dealing with 
things on a plane of which it would be absurd to predicate 
semi-ethical categories. With Titian, and particularly 
with the ** Amor sagro e profano," I do not feel this ; he 
is, however indefinitely, yet quite avowedly, trying to 
express an idea, and he probably had in his mind some 
quite definite idea. What that was, is unknown, but I am 
sure that, if he did take as his peg a scene from Ariosto, or 



i6o A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE 

a passage from the Argonautica, he had an ideal behind 
that scene of which the mythological idea was but the 
veil. The title "Sacred and Profane Love" has almost 
caught the note of the picture, but not quite. It implies 
that the two loves are separate, are inimical : what I 
believe is that the picture represents a similar truth to 
that which Browning afterwards put into verse : 

" God be thanked, the meanest of his creatures 
Has two soul-sides, one to face the world with, 
One to show a woman when he loves her ! " 

So the two women in the picture are the two sides of Love : 
Love clothed, and draped, and fashionable and restrained. 
Love as he walks in the world : and Love naked, and glori- 
ous and ardent and personal, Love as he comes in the 
secret meeting and the silent vow. It is the same woman 
who sits on each side of the fountain, the fountain which 
holds the water of life ; and the two women, who are one 
woman, represent the two modes — of which there are many 
and so different varieties — with which most of us commonly 
meet life. All of us, even the simplest and most candid, 
must at times walk in the trappings and wear the livery 
of society and the world ; and when we do so it is as well 
that we should do it with as gracious and courtly an air as 
possible. Nothing is more wearisome than the person who 
is so unconventional that he can never submit to the con- 
ventions of others. But while all of us must pay our 
tribute to the gods of the majority, of the things-in- 
common, all of us should try to have some moments in 
life, heady, breathless, delightful moments when we strip 
ourselves of every encumbering rag, and bathe gladly and 
freely and gratefully in the water of the Fountain of Life. 
Love, as he faces the world, may rightly wear trinkets and 
be clad upon with gorgeous garments; jewels and gold may 
be upon him, and in his disguise he will pass safely for one 
of the minor gods ; but Love when he meets the beloved 



ART AND ARTISTS i6i 

must do so naked and proud, bringing with him nothing 
but the beauty of his own body and soul. 

When we were at the Borghese Villa part of it was shut 
up, and we saw only the principal things, arranged together 
in the larger rooms on the ground floor. One of the 
pictures that everyone is expected to admire, a picture that 
is, in its way, a characteristic example of the master, is the 
" Danae " of Correggio. I have never seen any frank discus- 
sion of how far such a subject is justifiable in painting. It 
is generally considered sufficient to state that the motive of 
such and such a picture is mythological, and the painter 
has treated it in his usual sensuous style — and then to leave 
the matter. It scarcely seems a question that can be left 
there. I have no doubt in my own mind that there is no 
subject which may not be treated by an artist ; and no 
subject that is not susceptible of dignified treatment. I 
mean that to a Rembrandt a woman bathing or a beggar 
squatting in the sun may give an inspiration that raises 
his pictures to a reality and a dignity denied to Carlo Dolci 
or Michael Angelo da Caravaggio. Again there can be 
little doubt in the minds of people who are really interested 
in art that there is a vulgarity in Frith and his paintings, 
nay, in Cruikshank or Rowlandson, which is absent from 
Degas. I would premise this, then, that all subjects are 
legitimate material for an artist ; and that a great artist 
can make a beautiful thing out of the most unpromising 
or even displeasing subjects. Slight consideration will 
show that this is true. How often, for instance, do we 
say before a picture, or after reading a book, " Well, I 
never thought such a theme could have been matter for 
artistic treatment ; I should have said the man must have 
failed." And we feel that it is only success which justifies 
anyone attempting such subjects. Frequently if one were 
asked whether a man could portray certain things or in- 
cidents in paint, one would answer, *' No " ; but frequently 



i62 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE 

also, when we find the thing done, and done successfully, 
one is glad and ready to admit the exception. 

Now to me the range of mythological subjects which 
Correggio loved are mainly disgusting and distasteful. I 
cannot regard the lo, the Dana^, the Leda, or the Gany- 
mede story as so many pretty myths invented idly by a 
tired people : they represent only too truly that hideous 
background of perverse lust and cruelty and horror which 
lurks behind the beautiful marbles of Athens, and grins at 
one through the lines of Greek comedy. The horror of 
the hill, the terror of Pan, the unclean, furtive stories of 
strange metamorphoses are not idle tales ; they are 
temble survivals, kept in the lurid memory of the people, 
of things which once were on this earth, which, God knows, 
still hide in obscure and ghastly corners. The Middle Ages 
rightly shrank from them. They put them aside as things 
of the devil : they could at times treat them with hearty 
laughter such as they measured out to Satan and his imps ; 
but they laughed through the certainty of victory, through 
the assurance that these things were banished, that Pan 
no longer lurked in the brake, and no Apollo hid in the 
bushes for the downfall of their maidens. 

With the Renascence comes the change. We find even 
Michael Angelo, unless we disbeheve the ascription, 
meddling with the thing in his picture of " Leda and the 
Swan " ; and Correggio's graceful, beautiful art recurs more 
than once to the myths of gods and women. I believe 
there is a reason for this. The Renascence was insatiably 
curious ; it was not going to leave any corner of life unex- 
plored, and its artists were unwilling to leave any part of 
man's life unrepresented. Now even for the Renascence 
artists it did not seem possible to represent the most 
intimate relation between men and women ; and so they 
had recourse to the myths of Greece and Rome. For it is 
no use in trying to disguise the fact that such pictures as 
this " Danae," or the " lo," are attempts to represent what 



ART AND ARTISTS 163 

most people would say emphatically has no business to be 
represented in plastic, popular art. 

Now is there any difference between Correggio's *'Danae" 
and some frankly pornographic picture ? There is, of 
course, the difference made by the degree of idealization 
that Correggio cannot help giving his subject ; and there 
is in this picture an absence of any direct appeal to the 
lower things of life. But all the same the picture annoyed 
me more than Michael Angelo's " Leda," more than a frank 
presentation would have done ; the invasion of the shower 
of gold only accentuates what the painter has been trying 
to do, and you have the sin of cowardice added to the 
original offence of attempting something which should 
have been left alone. The real reason, of course, is that 
the passion of love is so far grander than its physical mani- 
festations ; that, in a way, its physical side is so ridiculous, 
so inadequate that it is not in the least fit for pictorial 
representation. Or rather, it is impossible to represent it, 
because, however wonderful the representation was, it 
must fall immensely short of the Divine truth which love 
symbolizes. The act of love is symbolic, and you cannot 
portray a symbol by repeating the formula in another 
medium ; to give a picture of a symbol you must use 
symbolic means, means that are universal in their appeal, 
where mere actual portrayings fail through being particular 
and limited. 

Coleridge years ago said the final word about Bernini : 
" Bernini, in whom a great genius was bewildered and lost 
by excess of fancy over imagination." How great a 
genius it was can be seen in the Borghese, where we have 
two early works of the sculptor's, the " David " and the 
" Apollo and Daphne." Even in the '* David " one can see 
that the artist has not got that high unifying faculty which 
alone will preserve the taste, without which the most con- 
summate craftsmanship is useless. In the '' Apollo and 



i64 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE 

Daphne," done when he was eighteen years old, we can see 
the clever boy producing with something like rapture a 
work that at any rate has vivacity and a certain charm. 
It does not suffer so much from its subject as other works, 
and we can quite easily forget for the moment the signifi- 
cance of the fatal laurel, and regard the statue as a joyous 
and, on the whole, pleasant attempt to breathe into stone 
the fragrance of spring love. It may be an error in taste, 
but, apart from these early works, Bernini really inspired 
me with least disgust when I saw his astonishing and 
tumbling fancies that are scrawled over San Pietro. I 
cannot sec that anything has shaken the dignity oi that 
building : the immensity of it is to me untroubled by the 
sprawling giants and the hot, unrestful baldachino. 
Bramante and Michael Angelo survive triumphantly 
through all the false ornament, and bad accessories, just as 
Hamlet will persist in remaining poetry even when given us 
as little more than the libretto of an elaborate pantomime, 
with an actor manager combining the parts of principal 
boy and the Widow Twankey. The thing I can least 
forgive Bernini for, the thing which, were I Pope, I would 
have smashed and ground into atoms and swallowed by 
the Jesuits, is the statue of S. Teresa. It is in the Church 
of Our Lady of Victory, which belongs to Teresa's children, 
and attempts to represent the saint in the moment of 
ecstasy. It is quite the worst statue I have ever seen ; it 
is insolently familiar in its efforts to give a picture of what 
is unutterable ; and when I remembered that the subject 
of this piece of hysterical sculpture was the grave vSpanish 
lady who had the brains of S. Thomas and the love of S. 
Francis, it was difficult to restrain my anger. It is an 
insult not only to one of the greatest friends of God, but 
to one of the most remarkable and sufficient women, one 
of the sanest and most reasonable creatures that ever 
adorned this earth and the Catholic religion. Would that 
the Discalced Carmelites could produce a new Teresa of 



ART AND ARTISTS 165 

Jesus ! She would make short work of Bernini's image of 
her predecessor. 

There is one other work that no visitor to the Borghese 
can overlook, and that is Canova's statue of Pauline 
Borghese, nee Buonaparte. This stupid, pretty, con- 
ceited woman makes a dull statue ; but it interested me, 
as the art of that period always does. Why is it that at a 
time when life was voluptuous, vulgar, exuberant, exces- 
sive, violent and subversive, the arts of painting and 
sculpture should be so generally tame, classical and calm ? 
Anything less like the shallow little strumpet that Pauline 
was than this half-draped figure of Canova's can scarcely 
be imagined ; the statue has neither character nor soul, 
and Pauline had the one to lose and the other to neglect. 
The statue has no feelings, no emotion, nothing but a 
certain calm indifference, eminently unsuited to the family 
to which she belonged. It is a curious thing that when life 
was as its wildest art should have been at its correctest : 
that we have no adequate picture, except in the wild 
creations of Goya, of the horrible, beautiful, bloody period 
of revolution and reformation. 

I expect the explanation of this can be found in the fact 
that the arts of painting and sculpture had in the eighteenth 
century ceased to be popular and become an appanage of 
wealth and rank : also they had suffered, inevitably, from 
the general false valuation of the rationalistic age, a 
valuation that made obedience to rules of more import- 
ance than life, and regularity the only key to greatness. 
When in the revolutionary period amazing reversals of 
fortune occurred, their effect was considerably lessened 
because of one fatal fallacy. The real motive, the real 
idea behind " Liber te, Egalite, Fraternite " was not that 
wealth and position were things accidental and indifferent, 
but that they were things to which the peasant had as 
much right as the prince. Of course they are not things 
to which anyone has any right. They are gifts, responsi- 



i66 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE 

bilities, toys, pleasures — anything but rights. So when 
you had the peasant sitting in the place of the prince he 
behaved neither as peasant nor as prince, nor as " the ideal 
man " ', he behaved like a peasant who had envied in 
the prince precisely those things which made the difference 
that the revolution sought to obliterate : and his envy 
soon issued in desire, and desire brought forth possession. 
This is why you get the heroes of revolution, not founding 
a new art or a new ethic, but encouraging the old art and 
the old ethic, not in the careless way of habit as did the 
aristocrat, but in the fierce way of assertion, of defiance, 
and an arrogant fear. Goya, as I have said, was an excep- 
tion ; but then Goya was a man of such strong personal 
genius, of so overbearing a character that he ignored the 
rules of society as well as the rules of art ; his paint was 
the reflex of his pride, and his familiarity with courts 
taught him nothing but contempt and anger. We have 
to wait, surrounded by a little army of Canovas, Thorwald- 
sens, Chantreys and Bankses, for nearly a century until, 
with Meunier and Rodin, we have the new sculpture, as 
vital and invigorating as was the following of the Goya 
revolt in painting by the French naturalists. 

In the Vatican Galleries we had very little idea of what 
we wanted to see. Dominic was anxious to see the Raphael 
" Transfiguration," because for years he had looked on 
a large photograph of the three figures at the top of the 
picture, the only part which can be given to Raphael. I 
had no wishes beyond seeking for beautiful things, so we 
went first to the room that contains the Raphaels and 
the Domenichino. Directly I saw the ''Transfiguration" I 
realized for the first time why I disliked that master's 
larger compositions. In his exquisite easel pictures of 
Our Lady, and in his portraits, he is following a tradition, 
and although he introduces an element of naturalism it 
does not affect the general devotional aspect of the picture : 



ART AND ARTISTS 167 

no treatment, if it retains any dignity at all, can com- 
pletely mar the idea of the Divine Child and His Mother. 
Directly, however, Raphael, in his later pictures, works on 
a larger scale, he fails because of his facility : he was master 
of many methods, but he never identified himself closely 
enough with any method in order to make that the natural 
embodiment of his character and his art. He was essenti- 
ally an experimentalist, a Stevenson of painting, too inter- 
ested in style and effect to rid himself of thinking over- 
much upon effect and style. Of course the lower part of 
the "Transfiguration" is not his own work, but the design 
and composition are his, and it is precisely there that 
Raphael really fails. I do not mean that he is not a 
master of composition : but he was ignorant of the truth 
that for a certain type of picture a certain kind of com- 
position was inadmissible. His one idea of getting 
motion into a composition~you can see it in the '' Burning 
of the Borgo " just as well — is by a theatrical method of 
emphasis. The result in the "Transfiguration" is disastrous. 
What Raphael intended was, undoubtedly, to have a 
strong contrast between the sublimity of the scene on the 
summit of the Mount and the confusion and distress 
below : what you have is a desperately theatrical crowd 
below, whose disturbing influence affects the upper scene. 
The postures of the three chosen Apostles carry on in the 
most unfortunate manner the gestures of the crowd, and 
even the figures of Moses, Elijah, and Our Lord are not 
quite released from the atmosphere that prevails over the 
greater part of the picture. 

Another great fault is the master's attempt to mix the 
realism of the crowd with the fancy that inspired the 
floating figures on the mountain top. The whole treat- 
ment might have been conventional, or the whole treat- 
ment realistic, or fanciful: but the mixing of two styles has 
resulted in failure. 

The other Raphael, a picture painted seven or eight 



i68 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE 

years before the " Transfiguration," is more pleasing, and 
yet spoiled rather by too great an emphasis. It is curious 
how the great men of this period began to forget the truth 
that you don't want more than one emphatic note in a 
picture ; that a series of emphases, all on the same point, 
necessarily lessens the desired effect. The pose of the 
Divine Infant is, in itself, unnatural and unchildlike, and 
when we notice the strained effect of S. Jerome to keep his 
face turned towards his client (and incidentally the public) 
and his eyes upon Madonna, and then find the attitude 
repeated in the gaze of S. Francis, in the look of Sigis- 
mondo Conto, the finger of the Baptist, and the upturned 
glance of the cherub with the little board, it is impossible 
to retain a feeling of simplicity that should be inspired by 
the motif. 

Of the minor masters, whose work I saw in Rome, I was 
most attracted by Niccolo di Liberatore, a native of 
Foligno, who flourished between 1430 and 1500. He is 
still largely governed by the rather stiff conventions of 
early painting ; fiis colour, while quiet and beautiful, is 
not as harmonious as in the later Italian masters, and his 
composition is on purely traditional lines. Yet there is 
about his work an individuality of devotion, a sincerity 
of touch that makes them stand out in any gallery. In the 
Vatican there are two altar-pieces, one of the Crucifixion 
of Our Lord, the other of the Coronation of Mary. The 
former, in its elaborate frame, remains with me as one of the 
most suitable " liturgical " pictures I have ever seen. It 
is this, I suppose, which makes one a little impatient with 
the later pictures. Whatever may have been the faults 
of the primitive people, they did at any rate grasp one 
truth supremely well : they knew that no art can stand, 
or ever does stand, by itself and for itself ; that art has 
a purpose. So whether you have a Memling, or a Fra 
Angelico, or a Ghirlandaio, decorating church or grave- 
yard or palace — you have a man '* doing his job '' with a 



ART AND ARTISTS 169 

definite aim in view. He does not paint an " easel 
picture " and then give it to a church for an altar-piece — 
he paints an altar-piece. He remembers the surroundings, 
the environment in which his picture has got to be seen, 
and he renders his picture subordinate to its purpose, and 
by this very subordination achieves a prominence all the 
more effective for being natural and proper. With the 
increase in naturalism, and in naturalistic ideas, with the 
greater desire for veracity and accuracy, artists lose the 
large truth that used to be their inheritance : they seek 
independence, and what they gain in that way is lost in 
purposefulness, in motive and in reality. 

So I turn gladly to this large, elaborate and yet simple 
altar-piece, a triptych, framed reredos-wise, of Niccolo's, 
with its stern lines, its almost grotesque attitudes, and yet 
a general graciousness, a calm that is lacking in later and 
more admired masters. There is in the Colonna Gallery 
another picture of this painter's, a cheerful little votive 
picture. Dominic and I christened it '* Our Lady of the 
Poker." In the foreground of the painting is a mother, 
wrestling with a demon for the body of her child. Her 
hands clasp the child, which the demon, one of those 
shaggy, rough, Pan-like beasts, is pulling away by an arm. 
The demon is snarling and spitting and swearing ; the poor 
child is howling ; and the mother is crying out to Mary. 
Up above, unseen by the demon and scarcely realized by 
the mother, is Our Lady, astonishingly calm ; and in her 
right hand is her sceptre — so like a modern poker — which 
with a kind of grave ease she is ready to bring down upon 
the demon's head. The fuss down below and the serenity 
above are really amazingly well contrasted : Madonna is 
dealing with the devil as a good housewife deals with a 
noxious insect. It is one of the most dramatic little 
pictures in Rome. 

We always found that after looking at comparatively 



170 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE 

modern work in Rome we turned not so much with rehef 
as with a kind of certain expectation to the older things. 
It is partly that the best side of the Renascence, except 
for Michael Angelo's works, is not represented at Rome ; 
and partly because the spirit of the great Christian city 
breathed more truly and purely in the early days of the 
Church. A day or two after we had gazed at the Vatican 
pictures we went to the Christian museum at the Lateran. 
If the Catacombs, with all their signs of love and rever- 
ence for the dead, are remarkable, what can we say of that 
great collection of sarcophagi which is to be seen at the 
Lateran ? No one who has any interest in the growth of 
symbolism in art can do otherwise than rejoice in the 
treasures here collected. The whole of the Old Testament, 
it would seem, from Adam and Noah to Jonah and 
Malachi, is ransacked to find in it symbols of Christ and 
Christianity. It must strike the most casual observer 
how astonishingly dissimilar was early Christian treatment 
of the Bible from that familiar in England since the 
Reformation. Here is no attempt to press literal details, 
and no effort to insist upon the actual truth of the narrative, 
but a violent and wholesale seizing of the Old Testament 
for allegorical and symbolic purposes. I don't mean to 
suggest that the early Christian, of average education, dis- 
believed in the story of Noah : but simply that for him 
the existing and thrilling thing was not that a Jewish 
patriarch had escaped from drowning, but that he himself, 
or his son, or his grandfather had escaped from the bonds 
of sin by the waters of baptism. Or again, no doubt the 
Roman Christian of the fourth century beheved firmly 
all the Pentateuchal story of Moses ; hut he believed it in 
the same way that he believed similar stones in pagan history. 
The Old Testament was not for him an exceptional record 
of exceptional stories ; it was no more and no less full of 
the marvellous than his own secular history. It never 
occurred to him that a belief in Moses was a part of the 



ART AND ARTISTS 171 

creed : it was not a matter of faith. Where Moses enters 
the region of faith it is as a symbol, and in the pillar of 
fire the early Christian saw the bitter way of penance by 
which sins were forgiven ; and, in the same spirit, Adam 
and Eve, on another sarcophagi, are represented with Our 
Lord, who gives to Adam a loaf and to Eve a lamb, in 
token of the broken bread in the upper room and the 
crucified Saviour on Calvary. 

Another feature, that I have mentioned earlier in this 
book, which deserves the attention of modern Christians, 
is the bold mixture of '* pagan " and Christian subjects. 
On one sarcophagus you find a marriage scene represented 
in the middle panel. The bride and bridegroom join hands, 
and Juno, with embracing arms, urges them to cherish 
one another ; at their feet Eros and Psyche are put, as 
the symbol of perfect love. Then on the right you have 
Our Lord calling Lazarus from the dead, and opposite is 
Moses striking the rock, s3'mbol of the hopefulness of 
Christianity. Such a combination of subjects shows 
clearly enough what was the early Christian view about 
the use of classical mythology : the golden rule evidently 
was to keep everything that was harmless and gracious, 
and to win it for Christ, just as they tried to win the graci- 
ous personalities of men and women. " The Harrowing 
of Hell," on which our ancestors loved to dwell, did not 
fetch from the infernal regions none but patriarchs and 
prophets and pious Jews : it rescued once and for all the 
good " pagan," the poor, defeated deities, and harmless 
beautiful gods which did exist, though in scarceness, 
among the revel and riot of the Greek and Roman Olympus. 

Here, on these sarcophagi, we found not only witness to 
the truth that Christ came to save the beautiful and the 
good wherever it might be found among gods or men ; 
but also that other truth, so peculiar to Christianity, that 
the whole creation was waiting for the Redemption. The 
canonical Gospels make no mention of the ox and the ass 



172 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE 

who shared the stable with Joseph, Mary and the Babe ; 
but in one of the apocryphal Gospels, with a great deal of 
rubbish, there is the tale of how Mary presented the child 
for the adoration of the animals : 

" And when Our Lord Jesus Christ was three dsLVs old, 
the most blessed Mary went forth from the cave, and 
entered a stable ; there she placed her boy in the manger, 
and the ox and the ass adored him. Then was fulfilled 
that which was spoken by Isaiah the prophet, saying, 
The ox knoweth his owner, and the ass his master's crib. 
For those very animals, the ox and the ass, never ceased 
from adoring him who was placed between them. Then 
too was accomplished that which was spoken by the pro- 
phet Habakkuk, saying, Between two beasts thou art 
manifested." ^ 

And on slabs, preserved in this museum, you will find 
the scene in the stable rendered with loving care. '* The ox 
knoweth his owner and the ass his master's crib," and the 
Lord of all does not disdain, when He receives the homage 
of theMagi and the shepherds, of His Motherand the angels, 
to receive too the adoration paid by the animal world. 
It is a fitting development from that superb sentence in 
Jonah, where the Almighty refuses to destroy Nineveh 
because there are in it many ignorant men and women 
" and also much cattle." 

In these galleries we had an astonishing shock. After 
poring over the sarcophagi we left to glance at the few 
pictures. There is a very attractive Crivelli, fragrant 
with all that painter's beautiful, individual personality ; and 
there is a Gozzoli which alone would have made the gallery 
worth looking at. There did not seem, however, to be 
much besides these two. Still we went on, and without the 
slightest warning we were suddenly confronted by an 
enormous picture of George IV., by Thomas Lawrence. 
^ Pseudo-Matthew, chapter xiv., from Tischendorf's text. 



ART AND ARTISTS 173 

Anything more entirely incongruous than this slim, sleek 
portrait of the " fourth of the fools and the oppressors 
called George " can hardly be imagined. There was 
nothing to do but to flee : and we fled. But camiot some- 
one of influence approach the Holy Father and beseech 
him to remove this ridiculous creature from such absurdly 
uncomfortable surroundings ? It is not fair to the 
visitors : it is contrast with no significance, it is like a 
filthy oath used in the middle of Mass, or a drunken ditty 
warbled in the middle of the Ring. It is an offence : it is 
the abomination of desolation standing where it ought 
not ; it should be taken away. 

In the pagan museum there are many beautiful things, 
but there is one thing which, above all, stands for a system 
of thought, an ideal of life which, though it has not 
definitely passed away — for our age has had Goethe — has 
yet become impossible in the calm dignity and aloofness 
that were possible by the Ilissus or in the Agora. Sophocles 
is not the typical Athenian : he is not the typical artist 
of Greece ; he is not the most characteristic dramatist. 
But Sophocles does remain the ideal Athenian far more 
than Pericles or Plato. The Sophoclean calm, the self- 
possession, the supreme dignity bitten ever so slightly with 
frost, is just what the heady, chattering, inquisitive, ardent 
Athenian longed and strained for. He was a man of great 
physical beauty — as a boy he had led the dancers naked 
through the streets of his city ; chosen he was from all, 
for his wonder and youth — he was impassioned, but not 
passionate ; poetical, yet sane ; religious, yet unenthusi- 
astic ; an artist, but a soldier and a partisan. He had 
none of the gaiety or insolence of Alcibiades, the Fox 
and Sheridan of Athenian politics ; he had none of the 
impracticable idealism of Socrates ; none of the heart- 
aching, revolutionary fervour of Euripides ; none of the 
massive, almost overwhelming devotion of ^schylus. 
He was avrdpKtjg — a servant of the Golden Mean, of the 



174 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE 

— dare I say it ? — the commonplace. He is chiefest and 
must remain chiefest of that small band of poets of whom 
Horace is the other most stately exemplar ; the poets who 
are on the side of order and law and convention, the poets 
who range themselves not with the prophet, but with the 
priest. " He saw life steadily and saw it whole " — it is a 
daring and amazing claim ; but I am not going to say it is 
not true. What I will say is this, if Sophocles saw life 
steadily and saw it whole he did more than a man should 
do ; anyone who sees life whole ought not to be able to 
rise from the vision with anything but blinded eyes and a 
broken heart. Something was lacking in that superb, 
calm, immaculate figure, and that something was love. 
Not so many years after Sophocles, there was born the one 
Man who saw life whole, and the vision led, not to a self- 
possessed serenity, but to Calvary. 

It is this Sophocles, the Sophocles whose calm is in- 
finitely dangerous to religion, that the sculptor has given 
us. It is Sophocles, the self-possessed, the secure, the 
great artist ; Sophocles with the mild eye, and the set 
mouth, that is portrayed for us in the Lateran museum. 
It is a wonderfully attractive figure : and yet — and yet 
I would give it for one glance at the troubled, brooding 
mask of Euripides, or the anxious, human expression of 
Socrates, or the clouded grace of Plato. I seem to see 
behind the figure of the most wonderful classic poet that 
ever lived the gangs of slaves, the cries of the oppressed, 
whose sufferings alone supported the civilization which 
made the Sophoclean ideal one that could be realized. It 
is fitting that we should see this statue in Rome : for it 
stands, as Imperial Rome stood, for selfishness ; selfishness 
of afar higher type, no doubt, than Rome's, but selfishness no 
less inimical to the claims of the Crucifix, to the Cross which 
was to the Greeks foolishness. To-day there are prophets 
who offer us Nietzsche and his gospel of Get On or Get Out 
— I wonder if Nietzsche ever realized that he was preaching 



ART AND ARTISTS 175 

what the American man of business had practised for 
years — and there are others who affirm that the reHgion 
of the Goth will supersede the religion of the Cross, and 
there are yet others who sigh after the Greek ideal. Let 
them remember two things. First, that Christianity has 
already met and conquered their favourite panaceas ; there 
is nothing new in their heresies ; secondly, that the Greek 
ideal, at any rate, is founded on a lie, and can only exist 
by a pretence. The suffering of man can never be ignored 
again, and any religion whose strength lies in ignoring it 
can never have any success outside a small circle of 
selected and cultured pagans. 

I turn from the *' Sophocles," " the type of perfect man- 
hood," the statue that portrays *' the self-reliance of genius 
and the unruffled dignity of manly beauty," back to the 
Man of Sorrows, with His visage marred more than the 
sons of men, back to Him in whom is no beauty nor 
comeliness, but who is yet the Desire of all the Nations. 



CHAPTER IX 

THREE ROMAN FUNCTIONS 

IT was a hot Sunday afternoon. Dominic and I had no 
plans, and there was a certain danger of the rest of the 
day till dinner-time slipping past without anything 
definite being done. That is not an event which would 
ordinarily alarm me ; but it was our last Sunday in Rome, 
and I knew there was something that I wanted to see, 
something that occurred on Sundays, which I had hitherto 
missed. I suddenly remembered. *' The Disputa at the 
Santi Apostoli." " Of course," answered Dominic ; and 
we got up and made straight for the church. 

The present building is not, in itself, of much interest : 
the restorer and the rebuilder have had their way with 
the temple of S. Philip and S. James pretty thoroughly 
since the days of Julius I. There is a beautiful tomb to a 
scandalous cardinal, Pietro Riario, nephew to Sixtus IV., 
and those curious in ecclesiastical history will linger for a 
moment by the tomb of Clement XIV., that ill-starred 
Pope who abolished the Company of Jesus, and shortly 
afterwards succumbed to a mysterious disease. I wonder 
when it will occur to a Pope that what is really the matter 
with the Jesuits is just this : they, externally the most 
cultured, the best educated, the most civilized of the great 
orders, are by their discipline and training only fit (and 
what an exception it is ! ) to deal with savage peoples and 
backward races. They are the only order who have made 
an effort to keep the people of Christ in leading-strings ; 
to administer milk and nothing but milk to the adult 

176 



THREE ROMAN FUNCTIONS 177 

Christian. Their taste in art, their taste in music, their 
taste in devotion, their taste in theology, their taste in 
ethics are all characteristic of the savage or the boy : they 
are quite unfit to deal with the world and worldly people, 
because they deal with those difficult problems by dallying 
with them, by compromise, by every method most disas- 
trous to the Church and most fatal for the poor sinners they 
would rescue. The simplicity, the honesty, the direct- 
ness, the stupidity of the Jesuits are what has made them 
the greatest missionary geniuses in the world, and one of 
the greatest failures in dealing with civilized and complex 
people : in the savage they have material which they 
recognize as inferior to themselves in moral and spiritual 
calibre, and so they treat it humbly and Christianly ; in 
the men of courts and camps they have had material which 
they suspect of being superior to themselves, and have 
treated it with pride and haughtiness mixed with that 
occasional deference which has made their name a byword 
for deceit. The dear, stupid people, with their rather 
low view of sarcamental life — even Xavier used baptism 
as if it were a charm — need hardship, and poverty, and 
misery to make them thoroughly happy and successful. 
They are the schoolmasters of the world ; and they have 
never yet learnt that most of Europe no longer needs a 
schoolmaster. So, if I were Pope, I would bid my black 
colleague keep his children on the mission field, and among 
simple people, who will be impressed and pleased by the 
jolly little exhibitions of mundane knowledge in which 
the society has always loved to indulge. That is where 
their real work lies, and not among highly educated and 
weary nations who want teachers that have not learning, 
but wisdom, and a theology springing not from law, but 
from love. 

In this church in 1766 there was a scene that has its 
own pathetic interest for English and Scots. James III., 

M 



178 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE 

King of England, Scotland and Ireland, had lived in Rome, 
feebly, and in exile, had died in the Palazzo Savorelli, and 
after his death the body was clad in royal robes, the crown 
was put upon his head, the orb in one hand, and the 
sceptre in the other, and the King of England lay in state 
for five days before the High Altar of the Santi Apostoli. 
In England itself George III. had been saying, " What ? 
What ? " from the royal throne for six years, and was 
to continue king de facto for another fifty-four ; it was 
twenty-one years since the year of Prince Charlie and the 
battle of Preston Pans, the entry into Carlisle, and the 
triumphant march on London ; twenty years since the 
victory of the Butcher and the soaked field of Culloden. 
Yet in spite of the decisions of Parliament and the army, 
for a brief five days James III. reigns as king ; king in 
death, and that reign may be taken as significant of the 
end of the Stewart dynasty, a dead d3masty : and much 
as we may dislike the Germans who strutted in the palaces 
of the Tudors and the Stewarts, the Plantagenets and the 
Normans, yet — a live dog is better than a dead lion, and 
we cannot leave the destinies of England in the cold hands 
of the crowned corpse in the Church of S. Philip and S. 
James. And I cannot think that, of the Scotch and Irish 
and English students from their various colleges, who 
passed before the body of their sovran, there were many 
who had any definite or vivid hope that the future would 
place upon the throne of England that " bonnie Prince," 
Charles Edward Lewis Casimir Stuart, who was saved 
from the English by Flora Macdonald, only to die in 
Rome in 1788 as Count of Albany ; nor did they hope, 
I think, that Henry, Cardinal Duke of York, Henry IX., 
as the inscription on the tomb, erected at the expense of 
George IV., calls him, should ever reign save as titular 
sovran of his people. 

Yet there is still in Rome one living link with the 
Stewart family. Every Saturday, in the Church of S. 



THREE ROMAN FUNCTIONS 179 

Maria in Campitelli, or Our Lady of the Portico — as it is 
also called — at eleven o'clock prayers are said for the 
conversion of England ; this devotion was founded by 
James III. in the year of his death, and since then " a 
perpetual intercession " has arisen here every week that 
England may be converted. When we wonder at the 
revival of Catholicism in this country, and discuss its 
causes, do not let us forget the little prayer guild founded 
by the Old Pretender. There are not many of his actions 
for which we can claim virtue or beauty ; but this surely 
is memorable, this which occurred to him just as his own 
feet were pressing towards the river of death — it is pleasant, 
is it not, that he should remember his country, the country 
of which he was bom King, and should ask that prayers 
should be made for ever, not for the return of the Stewarts 
to England, but for the return of England to the faith ? 

In the cloister of the church there is a memorial of a 
great attempt in the history of the church. You can see 
a tomb inscribed with the name of Bessarion, Archbishop 
of Nicea, Cardinal. He was one of the orthodox bishops 
who came to attend that council, first meeting at Ferrara 
and afterwards at Florence, that sought to heal the rent 
in the robe of Christ. As we know, the success of 
Eugenius, celebrated on the bronze doors of San Pietro 
in Vaticano, was neither a solid nor a lasting success ; 
Bessarion was too hopeful, Eugenius was too optimistic, 
and the tomb of the Greek archbishop remains as the 
witness to a fine effort nobly made, but made in circum- 
stances that almost ensured its failure. 

There is another name connected with this church which 
overshadows all the rest : the name of Michael Angelo. 
He had lived, while in Rome, in the parish of the Santi 
Apostoli, and when he died, on i8th February 1564, his 
body was taken there and buried. But on his deathbed 
he had turned from the Rome of his triumphs to the 



i8o A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE 

Florence of his affection. *' Take my body," he besought 
his friends, " take my body to my own most noble country, 
to Florence, to which I have always had the most tender 
of love." So his nephew demanded the body back, and 
did it up in a bale " such as merchants are wont to use," 
and so conveyed it to the city on the Arno. There it was 
received by all the painters, and sculptors and architects ; 
masters of all the arts greeted their master in every art, 
and they carried his body to the Church of the Holy Cross, 
and buried it there. 

And all that the Santi Apostoli retains of his memory 
is a tablet by Jacopo del Dorea, to testify that here was 
once put the corpse of the man whose genius is for ever 
knitted with the city and churches of Rome. 

Dominic and I looked at these memorials, and at the 
ugly baroque ceiling of the tribune by Giovanni Odassi, 
while we were waiting for the Dispute to begin. We had 
arrived just after two, and saw no signs of any service ; 
nor could we discover any notices from which we might 
glean the hours of the offices. However, just as we were 
wondering if we should have to give it up a priest appeared 
out of a vestry ; I asked him in the best Latin I could 
muster whether there would be a disputation this after- 
noon, and if so, " when." He answered, obviously pleased 
at being accosted in Latin, that it was at 2.45, and so we 
prepared to wait. It was well worth waiting for. 

Exact to the minute there came two priests, and 
approached the platform which stood on the north side 
of the nave, towards the chancel. One was large, imposing, 
imperial, solemn in appearance — a man of presence and 
dignity, about fifty years old or so ; the other was short, 
sparrow-like, full of innumerable wrinkles, feeble, and very 
old in appearance at any rate, yet incredibly lively. 

There was a good congregation in the church by now ; 
and there was a movement of pleasurable expectation 
when it was seen who the two protagonists were. They 



THREE ROMAN FUNCTIONS i8i 

sat side by side on the little platform ; and the big man 
started off with a rotund, serious delivery of an orthodox 
sermon. He was going to speak, he said, about mysteries. 
There were many mysteries in the Christian religion. 
There was the mystery of the Holy Incarnation ; there 
was the mystery of the Holy Trinity, and so on. His 
voice poured out just such a sermon as I have frequently 
heard at home, only rather more oratorically delivered, 
and rather more neatly thought out. All the time he was 
talking his companion was not idle. The first five minutes 
or so were not interrupted by speech, but by the most 
inimitable face play. The little, old, wizened man winked 
at us ; he screwed his face up ; he shrugged his shoulders ; 
he put out his tongue ; he jerked contemptuous thumb 
and frivolous shoulder at his large colleague, who ignored 
all these impertinences and went gravely on. 

Suddenly he was interrupted verbally. 

" And chese mysteries of which you babble so much — 
what are they ? What is a mystery, eh ? " 

Then, while the big man was fumbling for an answer, his 
opponent darted eager hands and expostulating words at us. 

** A mystery ! Phew ! A mystery, what is a mystery ? 
Isn't it just like these religious people ? If you ask them 
what an}^ thing means they say, * Oh, it's a mystery.' Why 
can't you be like the men of science ? " 

Here the big man interrupted. 

** Science, too, has her mysteries. Not alone in the 
heart of religion is God revealed ; there are things which 
science knows but cannot explain. Who can explain the 
electric telegraph, the telephone. Who can explain ? " 

" Bah ! who wants to explain the telegraph or the 
telephone ? " (with a ridiculous imitation of the other's 
sonorous boom). " They work. We know we can trust 
them. They are good. We use them. Can you say that 
for your religious mysteries ? Do they work ? What 
earthly good are they to anyone, anyhow ? Tell me." 



i82 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE 

" I will tell you. I will tell all these people whom you 
are trying to mislead. Take one of our Catholic mysteries. 
Take the mystery of the communion of saints. Many of 
you in this church can testify willingly and gladly how 
often you have been helped and assisted when you have 
called upon the aid of God's most blessed saints. How 
powerful and availing is the intercession of the Holy 
Mother of God ! How many wonderful blessings have 
been given us at the prayers of S. Philip and S. James, and 
at the request of S. Augustine ! Oh ! how thankful " 

" Phut ! Wait till later ! Then you will see how much 
use the saints are ! When you're down in hell, hot, 
burning, and you're crying out, ' Acqua ! acqua ! ' plucky 
lot of use S. Augustine will be then ! And I don't suppose 
that it'd be water that you'd be crying after, either ! " 

This last attack, so irrelevant, so unscrupulous, is too 
much for the gravity of the big man, who breaks into a 
slow smile before answering his opponent. 

Unfortunately Dominic and I had to go, as we had some 
friends to meet about half-past three. As we strolled 
away, Dominic, who had followed the dispute more accur- 
ately and even more attentively than I, began to eulogize 
the custom. 

" How I wish we could do that in England ! You can't 
think how tired we get of the ordinary sermons." " I 
can," I intervened, governed, I suppose, by the spirit of 
the wasplike little creature we had left on the platform. 
" Oh, listening, that's nothing ! You can sleep — or 
say your prayers, or even try to get some good out of a 
bad sermon. What's your favourite quotation to prove 
the proper pronunciation of patience ? " 

" ' The worst speak something good ; if all want sense, 
God takes a text and preaches patience,' '•* 

I murmured. 

" Exactly. But what about the preacher ? Do you 



THREE ROMAN FUNCTIONS 183 

imagine that he never longs for interruption, for argu- 
ments, for interest ? Can't you see how bored we get of 
the sea of dull, blank faces, and gaping mouths, over which 
our words — rotten as they are sometimes — swirl hope- 
lessly ? Fm sure it would be good for everyone if we 
could have the disputation in England. Why, look at the 
congregation. The audience this afternoon was as pleased, 
as lively, as entertained as if they were at a theatre. 
They followed the discussion eagerly, keenly. I don't 
say that there was any very exalted argument to follow : 
a good deal was just fooling, but what good fooling ! " 

" Yes ; but do you think they get any religious 
good ? " 

" Of course they do. They learn for one thing that 
religion and theology are not things which can be swallowed 
whole ; that they have no value until they are assimi- 
lated and to some extent understood. Most of our people 
at home— you'd know if you'd ever prepared anyone for 
Confirmation — are only anxious to be stuffed : they don't 
want to think or to argue. They just want to be told." 

" That, I suppose, is why we have so many Dissenters 
and Protestants." 

" Oh ! there's no use your trying to be sarcastic ! As 
it happens, I think you've hit the right nail on the head. 
The essence of modern Protestantism is lack of thought, 
combined with plethora of feeling. That horrible heresy 
that a man was saved * by faith ' if he ' felt ' he was, has 
corrupted English religion most terribly. You have all 
the people, people like Henson or Clifford or Campbell, 
who talk beautiful and vague things about the evils of 
denominationalism ; all they mean is that they hate to 
be forced to think clearly, definitely. They are the 
counterpart of the old impressionist school of painting, 
that insisted on seeing all things in a haze, and free from 
outline. They are the advocates of myopia, the adher- 
ents of astigmatism in theology. Bless you ! Do you 



i84 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE 

think Henson would ever sit up on a platform and have his 
Protestant platitudes ridiculed to pieces in front of his con- 
gregation by the sharp wit of some Christian whose Catholi- 
cism had sprung from a healthy scepticism ? Of course he 
wouldn't. He doesn't want to think : he wants to preach. 
All the English do. You at least ought to be able to appre- 
ciate that, for the Welsh and Irish at any rate can fight." 

" But you've just given me the objection I wanted. 
* Scepticism,' you said : don't you think for a priest to 
mock the facts of religion in pubhc is a very dangerous 
thing. Isn't he likely to sow the seeds of doubt ? " 

" I hope so. It's just what we want. We don't doubt 
enough. I don't mean I'm advocating the kind of bosh 
which you can hear based on Tennyson's 

-- ' There lives more faith in honest doubt, 
Believe me, than in half the creeds. '- 

That kind of doubt isn't doubt at all. Those doubters 
are merely the people who are sure that Catholicism is 
wrong, and hope vaguely that Our Lord is God : very 
certain that you must not teach dogma except their own 
dogma that none is necessary. When I say we want more 
doubt I mean real, humble, inquiring doubt. After all, we 
do know precious little about the things that hit us most. 
We have a revelation about the main truths of religion 
and we believe it. But * What is death ? ' * Why is pain ? ' 
' Whence is evil ? ' — those are the questions which plague 
us still, and which we probably shall not answer, though 
we shall always try. If a man starts with real modest 
doubt he will go on and inquire, and pray and seek — and 
then we know he will find. From the seeds of doubt 
springs the fruit of faith. Are there any names in modern 
Christian theology more uplifting than Pascal and New- 
man : and was not each of them naturally sceptical ? " 

" You may be right ; but all the same I can't picture 
you on a platform ! " 



THREE ROMAN FUNCTIONS 185 

" I ! I should be no earthly good ; but there are lots 
of priests I can think of who would be splendid. And as 
for congregations ? I hardly know one which wouldn't be 
benefited." 

The Church of Santa Maria in Ara Coeli, or in Capitolio, 
is full of small, pleasant interests. I am glad that it 
belongs to the Franciscans, because it seems suitable that 
the order whose founder started the devotion of the Holy 
Crib should have charge of the church which has the 
most famous and miraculous image of the Bambino in the 
world. I am a heretic, I'm sorry to say, about the Ara 
Coeli Bambino. I don't like it. It is not nearly so beau- 
tiful as that which Prince Porlonia gave to the Church of 
S. Andrea, and before which pass all the rites of the 
strange East. Still I would not venture to doubt the 
affection which this little image evokes in the hearts of 
the Roman people, and more particularly of the Roman 
children. And the story of the Bambino has its own 
interest. It is not old, as many fancy it to be. Early in 
the seventeenth century a Franciscan, visiting the Holy 
Land, took some wood from the Garden of Olives, and 
from it carved the image of the Holy Child. On his way 
back to Rome his boat was wrecked at Livorno ; but the 
Bambino was kept safely, and brought to Ara Coeli in 
1647. Since then it has been one of the greatest objects 
of devotion in Rome, and has been carried to innumerable 
sick-beds, and consoled countless mourners : so, plain and 
ugly as we may think the little image to be, we can hardly 
fail to venerate it, sanctified as it is by so many tears of 
gratitude, the recipient of so many cries of sorrow. 

We saw two ceremonies connected with the Bambino. 
One afternoon, during the Octave of the Epiphany, we 
went into the church, and heard there the shrill voice of a 
girl, preaching, or rather declaiming, on a little platform. 
In the Chapel of the Epiphany lay the Bambino, with the 



186 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE 

ordinary scenery that may be seen in any church at 
Christmastide : opposite this shrine was the platform, 
and there, with an abundance of gesture and a great free- 
dom of speech, was a Uttle girl addressing herself fervently 
to the Holy Child. She had just finished when we 
entered, and she slipped down to give place to another. 
The new-comer was evidently a rich little girl. About 
twelve years old, she was dressed entirely in white, silk 
and fur, she wore white stockings and white silk shoes ; 
had white gloves, and a large white hat with a white 
feather curled round the brim. She had no nervousness, 
and delivered her little sermon as if she were " speaking a 
piece " at the annual school treat. There was just the 
slightest effort at acting, but while she was not stiff, her 
manner could not be called natural. Towards the end 
of her speech she made a pretty little gesture, half- 
genuflexion, half-curtsy, to the Holy Child and stepped 
off the platform. 

The next little child — another girl — was in a great hurry 
to get up. And here we saw one of the pleasantest things 
of the whole ceremony. The new-comer was a poor girl, 
dressed neatly in black, but with holes in her stockings 
and a genuine air of real poverty. As she was running up 
the steps to the platform she stumbled, and the Little 
White Girl, ever so prettily, took hold of her hand and 
steadied her, and then, with hardly a moment's hesitation, 
instead of going off the platform, the White Girl brought 
forward her poorer sister, still holding her hand, and, as 
it were, with a little happy, friendly gesture, introduced 
her to us — and so disappeared. I had been grumbling a 
little to Dominic about the White Girl : I thought she was 
** bossy " and too " swagger," but this pretty act of 
kindness made me feel very ashamed of my criticism. 
The act was done without a suspicion of patronage, and 
it was plain that the poor girl was pleased by it. Her 
speech was wonderful : full of natural dramatic fire and 



THREE ROMAN FUNCTIONS 187 

concentrated devotion. She addressed the Bambino with 
tears in her voice and eyes ; she had one of those exquisite 
silver voices of youth which, while passionless, have in 
them something deeper and higher than passion, some- 
thing stronger and more intense than the high and deep 
notes of maturity. She exclaimed to the Bambino her love 
for His birth, and the joy she and all children had in the 
story of the starlit night, of the wondering shepherds, 
and the attendant angels. She besought Him to help them 
to be good, to help them to be to their mothers something 
of what He was to His : and then with a final, beautiful 
groping gesture — ripae uUerioris amove — she stopped and 
left the platform. 

The next and last speaker was a boy — such a nice boy 
of about ten, or even less. He had the bright alertness of 
the clever boy, and something I thought of the boy's 
natural feeling about girls. His attitude, the first minute 
or two of his speech, was as if he said to the Bambino : 
" Of course they weren't bad, those girls : but it takes a 
boy to understand, really, doesn't it ? I know what you 
must have felt like — I've got a young brother of my 
own." There was the most delightful mixture of freedom 
and reverence, of devotion and dependence : the boy 
seemed unconsciously to have solved that most mysterious 
of all theological problems — the double nature of Our 
Lord. He could worship him as God, and speak to Him 
as one boy to another. So I imagined might the young 
John the Baptist have spoken, and the son of Zebedee, 
who afterwards laid his head on the Master's bosom. 

As we left Ara Coeli Dominic and I agreed that it was 
such a scene as we had just witnessed which explained in 
some degree the power of the Catholic Church over children 
— when the Holy Family and the Holy Child are left in 
the foreground of children's religion, you do encourage a 
spirit of natural and loving devotion which is much harder 
to encourage in a cult where the early life of Our Lord is 



i88 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE 

mainly a matter of the past, a pale record of Palestinian 
days. It is easier for the children of Rome to see as the 
poet saw : 

" I saw a stable, low and very bare, 
A little child on a manger. 
The oxen knew Him, had Him in their care, 

To men He was a stranger. 
The safety of the world was lying there 
And the world's danger." 

On another day — the Octave of the Epiphany — 
Dominic and I went again to the Ara Coeli. It was a 
brilliant afternoon, and the crowd was beginning to fill 
the streets for the great procession, which would end with 
the blessing of the city by the Holy Child. We went into 
the church by the south door, up near the High Altar, then 
we walked there and paused for a moment before the stable 
where the Bambino still lay, waiting for His procession. 
Then Hislop, who was with us, warned us that if we wished 
to see the procession outside the church we had better go 
out now. So we went out of the west door and found our- 
selves on the top of that giddy flight of marble steps 
which were moved here from the Temple of the Sun on 
the Quirinal. 

The space at the top was already nearly filled. People 
were pushing and scrambling to get into good positions : 
Americans, with sharp accents and tiny Kodaks, were 
setting themselves firmly against the advancing streams 
of people who were still scaling the steps. There was a 
minute or two when things might have become awkward : 
some stout, rough students from the Scotch College came 
rushing up the steps, and met a small body of people who 
were coming out of the church : in the end, room was 
found for all, and we waited for the first notes of the hymn. 
In a moment the procession began to emerge from the 
front door, incense pots, banners, candles, crucifixes, a 
long double row of Franciscan brethren, then a row of 



THREE ROMAN FUNCTIONS 189 

Franciscan tertiaries, and then the priests — and one 
of them, in a stiff, rather handsome cope, carrying the 
Bambino. Somehow a way was forced through the crowd, 
and at last the small group of priests in their vestments 
was securely gathered at the far corner, looking out over 
the city straight down the steps. 

There was a moment's silence : even the Americans 
stayed from talking, and the priest raised the image of 
the Baby on high and solemnly blessed the city. The 
poor little image was glittering with stones — which rumour 
whispers are false — and swaddled in silk and satin ; and 
the strange, hard face had none of the mystical depth of 
childhood : yet as I stood there, and received the blessing, 
it was not difficult for me to get back to that time when 
Mary lifted the Child in her arms that He might bless the 
Magi and the shepherds ; or that other day, beneath the 
hard sky of Egypt, when the Holy Infant cured Dismas 
under the shadow of the nameless Sphinx. It was not 
difficult to remember that here at any rate was a mystery 
of my religion boldly and definitely set forth, a mystery 
defiantly and persistently contrary to human knowledge 
and learning — that the hands of a babe held the universe, 
and that a woman suckled the Creator and Saviour of 
the race. So long as Rome upholds to her children the 
mystery of the cradle and the shame of the cross, so long 
will she win sinners to Christ ; and the religion that tries 
to minimize the meaning of Bethlehem and ethicize the 
significance of Calvary may live for a while in the airless 
study, but will never survive in the world of pain and 
suffering and cruelty. Rome does not undervalue the 
pomp and the power of life, but in reality she knows that, 
far more important than all her power, far more true than 
all her pomp is just that blessing of the Child, just that 
stretch of the arms of the cross, which spread from eternity 
to eternity, and yet have no other source than the heart 
of Jesus. She does swaddle the Bambino in ungainly 



igo A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE 

garments and cover Him with jewels and gold and tinsel, 
yet she never forgets that it is the Bambino which she is 
decking, and that He alone is worthy to receive all of riches 
that the world can produce ; and I confess to have listened 
with very little patience to a woman who turned after the 
blessing to her friend, and said, " How disgraceful, how 
absurd to cover a little doll like that with such expensive 
things, and to put all those jewels there too ! " I looked 
at her hands, on which shone opals and diamonds ; I looked 
at her clothes, expensive and fashionable — and I mur- 
mured to myself, ** How wasteful to deck that collection 
of dust with so many beautiful things ! " I hasten to say 
that I do not object to either image being decked ; and 
indeed I rather prefer, as a matter of taste, to see the human 
image of God covered with gorgeous garments and jewels 
— but the thoughtlessness of her objection was too much 
for me at the moment — at any rate the Bambino of Ara 
Coeli will outlast her poor body, and when all of us who 
were there are scattered dust the little image of olive 
wood will still be blessing the capital and the city, from 
the top of those steep marble steps that once led to the 
Temple of the Sun, and now lead to the shrine of the Altar 
of Heaven. 

Unfortunately the Franciscan convent that used to be 
near the church has been pulled down to make way for 
that glorification of Victor Emmanuel which, I suppose, 
nothing can now prevent, though Roman carelessness 
postpones it. It was notable for having the room of S. 
Bernardino of Siena, that friar whose fuliginous sermons 
furnish so much awful material to the modern decrier of 
mediae valism. S. Bernardino is commemorated in a 
chapel which has frescoes by Pinturicchio ; but they are 
not by any means the best work of that master, and have 
also been a good deal restored. In spite of this, however, 
they do suit the character of the church, and the life of the 



THREE ROMAN FUNCTIONS 191 

saint ; there is evidenced that singular childlike charm 
of which I shall speak again when we come to Pintu- 
ricchio's other work in Rome. 

For English people and lovers of literature the church 
has the peculiar interest of being the place where Gibbon 
first conceived the idea of writing the " Decline and Fall." 
It is curious to think that the cynical historian evolved 
his scheme here in a church which flaunts triumphantly 
all that he most disliked in Christianity, all that he was 
most eager and least able to explain. 

The name of the church covers a disappointing legend, 
just as the altar in the transept chapel (the chapel of S. 
Helena's tomb) encloses an ancient altar — the Ara Primo- 
geniti Dei. The legend that Augustus had a vision in 
which Our Lord appeared and disclosed His claim is obvi- 
ously a story, invented probably to explain some historical 
difficulty. It seems likeliest that some genuine Roman 
altar was found with a half-legible inscription (say, " Fidei 
Aug. Sacr ") which the discoverers misunderstood and read 
" Filio Dei Aug. Sacra." ^ Augustus would have in his 
favour his connexion with Virgil, whom the Christian mind 
early identified with the inner truth of its religion ; and 
the emperor who honoured the writer of the Pollio eclogue 
might reasonably be supposed to have Christian leanings 
himself. 

But one would not have the name altered. We may 
interpret afresh. For all modern Christians it may stand 
for the truth that the altar of heaven stood in the stable 
of Bethlehem, that we have no need to go further than to 
the Mother and the Child if we want to cry out, " How 
dreadful is this place, this is none other but the house of 
God, and this is the gate of heaven." 

^ See The TahUt, 26th March 1904. 



CHAPTER X 

THE LATERAN AND S. MARIA MAGGIORE 

IT was S. Francis who founded and fostered the devotion 
to Our Lord's infancy, by the dehghtful custom of 
building cribs in the churches at Christmastide ; and it 
was the order of the Poverello which founded and encour- 
aged that other devotion to Our Lord's humanity, the 
Way of the Cross. The stations can be vulgarized by 
bad pictures, and made commonplace by too mechanical 
a repetition ; but there are few common devotions which 
have, in so high a degree, the power of rousing personal 
feeling and awakening individual sorrow and repentance. 
The danger about any form of revival, the over-eloquent 
sermon, the almost too poignant appeal, the sensational 
excitement of emotional hymns is that the feeling aroused 
may not be individualized at all : it may remain vague, 
floating, something shared with the crowd of which one is 
a part, something that we catch in the atmosphere of the 
church, keep for the glow of half-an-hour afterwards, and 
then lose promptly in the round of daily life. To use the 
ordinary terms, these modern devotions and revivals and 
awakenings are too subjective : the worshipper's mind is 
forced back upon his own sins and misdeeds, upon his own 
necessities and hardships, upon his own griefs and troubles ; 
in the devotion of the Way of the Cross self is incidental. 
The mind and heart are both dwelling on the agony of the 
Divine Victim ; repentance for the suffering caused to Him 
is the only personal feeling that is allowed to supervene ; 
there is none of that comfortable and conscious self- 

192 



THE LATERAN 193 

condemnation which is so common a feature of the revival- 
ist crowd ; none of that curious interest in sin which 
encourages morbid introspection. 

One of the greatest safeguards that the Middle Ages 
possessed against undue subjectivity in religion was the 
worship of relics, and the devotions to particular aspects 
of Our Lord's human life, and even to particular parts of 
His body, as the devotion of the Holy Face, or of the Five 
Sacred Wounds. For it is clear that when you have the 
mind dwelling vigorously and fruitfully on a mystery that 
so far transcends any ordinary human experience the risk 
of exaggerating the importance of one's own spiritual life, 
one's own spiritual troubles, one's own petty doubts and 
despondencies becomes infinitesimal. 

How often to-day does one meet religious people whose 
religion is a source, apparently, of worry rather than of 
consolation. That means, as a rule, that they have the 
temperament — by far the most usual temperament among 
men and women — that demands some very definite object 
for religious faith, and for feeding the religious idea, unless 
their devotion is to sink back upon itself, poor and wretched, 
perpetually rebreathing the old air, while the soul dwells 
on the problem of its existence rather than on the beauty 
and mystery of the experience of God, His Mother, and the 
saints. Such people are not given enough to do. They 
think overmuch. They worry overmuch. Instead of 
taking their worries into religion they take their religion 
into their worries and lose it there ; they never achieve 
the happiness which is the Christian's right, the calm which 
is the Christian's true heritage. Of course, there are 
some others who are satisfied without objective religion 
— or rather who have sufficient strength of imagination 
and character, a strong and lively faith enough to feed upon 
a directer vision of God than is possible for most mortals : 
but these are the exceptions, and it is not for the excep- 
tional that a church should regulate. 



194 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE 

I was led into this train of thought when I went through 
the devotion of the Scala Santa. This rehc is one that 
causes a good deal of heart-burning to the historian. 
For myself I do not think there is any reasonable doubt 
that the steps were never nearer Pilate's palace than they 
are now ; and I would suggest that when the devotion 
began, probably at the time of the Crusades, no one 
thought they were the original stairs up which Our Lord 
went. 

It was a common mediaeval habit to bring back from 
the Holy Land little memorials of the sacred places ; a 
bit of earth from the Garden of Gethsemane, for instance. 
Now, although it is difficult to trace exactly when first 
the Scala Santa was erected, it is unlikely that it was 
before the eleventh or twelfth century : what more natural 
to suppose than that a pious Roman brought back from 
Jerusalem four or five chips of stone from the staircase of 
what was shown as Pilate's palace, and that these were 
then enshrined in the steps put up in the Lateran ? The 
rest would follow easily enough. Endless confusion and 
a good deal of mockery has followed from the habit of 
calling a head-reliquary (which frequently contains a tiny 
splinter of bone) Caput Joannis Baptistae, or Laurentii 
or Thomae : the original title is just " De Capite 

Sancti ." In the same way these stairs, containing 

the relics of the stairs at Jerusalem, gradually became 
identified with the steps themselves. 

But why put up a staircase at all ? Simply because 
someone, possibly the Pope, saw here an opportunity 
for a new devotion. Just as the Franciscans had popu- 
larized the Way of the Cross, so here was a chance of 
impressing on people's minds the dragging of Jesus up to 
the palace of Pilate, and giving the faithful a method of 
following every detail of that day of sorrow. 

When Dominic and I went up the stairs there were no 
others save a mother with her four children. We were 



THE LATERAN 195 

glad to go up with the children, for if one had had any 
doubts as to the beauty of the devotion they would 
have been dissipated by the sight of how the children 
took it, gladly and gravely, with an evident understanding 
of what they were doing, and why : it was a suitable 
pendant to the gay little scene at Ara Coeli. There the 
Bambino was holding, as it were. His Court, and the 
children were making birthday speeches in His honour : 
here, at the Scala Santa, was the way of a Passion : voices 
were hushed, the children were on their knees, prayers 
were just murmured, and over all hung the hand of 
Death. Yet there was one great fact in common between 
the two scenes, a fact that is peculiar to Christianity : 
it was the fact of God's need. No other religion sets up 
for adoration a God that asks for men's help ; no other 
faith has proclaimed before the universe, as its Heart and 
its Source, a heart that is human in its aching for sympathy 
and love. Inspiring our action on the day of the Epi- 
phany, encouraging our fumbled progress up the stairs 
was the great, almost incredible thought, " God wants 
me." Often enough the sceptic will say, " Do you think 
that those prayers and elaborate services, and your 
kissings and kneelings, your genuflexions and devotions, 
make any difference to the blessed and immutable God ? " 
And generally some theologian is summoned ; and it is 
carefully explained that really, of course, they do not 
make any difference ; that their value is not entirely 
subjective, nor yet absolutely objective ; that popular 
religion must have popular manifestations, and — ^but the 
evasions tire me. The core of Christianity is that what 
we do does affect God. " How " we cannot understand, nor 
does the " how " matter, but we know that God wants us, 
and our prayers and our devotions ; that the nature of 
God is most truly shown to us in the character of Jesus, 
and the character of Jesus stands out in every word and 
every action reported, and, above all, in those two sen- 



196 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE 

tences : " Jesus beheld the city, and wept over it," and 
" Jesus beholding him, loved him." 

At the top of the stairs is the Sancta Sanctorum, the 
only portion left of the old Lateran. Here are many 
great and famous relics, and not long ago a good few were 
removed and placed in the Vatican, with duly authorized 
seals and attestations — among those taken away was what 
is probably the head of S. Agnes, It was here too that 
for a long time the heads of SS. Peter and Paul were 
kept, and exposed to the veneration of Christians. Mon- 
taigne, who cannot be dismissed as unobservant or un- 
critical, gives an account of what he saw : 

" On Easter Eve I went to see, at S. John Lateran, the 
heads of S. Paul and S. Peter, which are exhibited here on 
that day. The heads are entire, with the hair, flesh, 
colour and beard, as though they still lived ; S. Peter 
has a long, pale face, with a brilliant complexion approach- 
ing the sanguine, with grey peaked beard, and a papal 
mitre on his head ; S. Paul is of a dark complexion, with 
a broader, fuller face, a large head, and thick grey beard. 
These heads stand in a recess some way above you. 
When they are shown, the people are called together by the 
ringing of a bell, and a curtain is then slowly pulled down, 
behind which you see the heads, placed side by side. 
The time allowed for viewing them is that in which you 
can repeat an Ave Maria, and then the curtain is again 
raised ; shortly after, the curtain descends, and once 
more ascends, and this is repeated thrice, so as to afford 
everyone present an opportunity of seeing. This exhibi- 
tion takes place four or five times in the course of the 
day. The recess is about a pike's length above you, and 
there is a thick iron grating before the heads. Several 
lighted tapers are placed in front of them, outside the 
recess, but still you cannot very well distinguish the 
particular features. At least I could not, and I saw them 



THE LATERAN 197 

two or three times. There was a bright poHsh over the 
faces which make them look something Hke our masks." ^ 

Here also is preserved one of those pictures which 
tradition ascribes to S. Luke. All that is known certainly 
about it is that it is as old as the eighth century, and may 
be a fellow of that mysterious portrait supposed to have 
been owned by King Abgar of Edessa, a contemporary 
of Our Lord : but the historian is a little chary of putting 
trust in anything relating to that somewhat fabulous 
monarch. 

As to when and why this little chapel got its name 
and was allowed to boast " Non est in toto sanctior orbe 
locus " it is difficult to determine : it sounds suspiciously 
as though its early guardians were anxious to put it on a 
seeming equality \\dth shrines which had greater and more 
arresting associations for the pilgrim ; for while it has 
been exceptionally favoured in the possession of relics 
that have no connexion with it, it would need a somewhat 
violent bias for anyone to agree with the inscribed state- 
ment on the cornice : leaving out of count Jerusalem, 
there are in Rome itself many places with equal claims to 
sanctity. I believe there is something in the air about 
the Lateran which makes for bragging, else how explain 
that legend that runs round the fagade of the Church of the 
Baptist in the Lateran, ** Omnium urbis etorbis ecclesiarum 
mater et caput " — " Mother and Head of all the churches 
in the city and in the world " ? In the city, true : for 
this, Constantine's basilica, and not San Pietro in Vaticano, 
is the church of the See and Bishop of Rome. S. Giovanni 
in Laterano is the official church of the Episcopal See : 
San Pietro in Vaticano is the church of the Holy Father, 
or the Pope ; it belongs, as it were, to a later order of 
things. The chapter of San Giovanni has precedence 
over that of San Pietro ; and it was in San Giovanni, up to 
* Montaigne, '* Travels in Italy." 



198 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE 

the time of the stupid quarrel with the State, that the 
Pope had to be enthroned and crowned. But Mother and 
Head of all the churches in the world, or Queen, as it is 
called in some papal bulls — that it emphatically is not. 
That is an honour that might perhaps be given to Jerusa- 
lem, where the Lord's brother ruled ; otherwise it might 
fall equally to Antioch and Rome, but certainly the See 
of Antioch — where we were first called Christians — cannot 
yield its pride of place to the See of Rome — and none but 
a Roman bishop would ever have thought it could. 

Still, as the metropolitan church of the patriarchal See 
of the West, it is rightly called Mother and Head of all 
churches in Rome, and we may add in Europe : it is 
here where the Holy Father should every year solemnly 
pontificate on the First Sunday in Lent, on Palm Sunday, 
on the Thursday in Holy Week, on Holy Saturday, on 
Easter Monday, on Whit Sunday, on the feast of the 
patron, S. John Baptist, the Exaltation of the Holy 
Cross, the feast of the dedication, and the anniversary of 
his election. At present the Pope never goes near the 
Lateran ; if he did, it would break that curious legend of 
the Prisoner of the Vatican which the Roman Curia loves to 
keep up, long after it has ceased to amuse or mystify the 
rest of Christendom. There is, however, a grave danger 
of Catholics getting so used to the idea of the Pope in the 
Vatican, of connecting him always with San Pietro and the 
cardinals, as to forget altogether that Pius X. is also a 
bishop. Bishop of Rome, and successor in the chair of 
Peter. When shall we have a Pope who will see, or whose 
advisers will allow him to see, that by far the best blow 
would be struck against the assailants of the Holy See if 
the Pope calmly accepted the position thrust upon him 
by the State, definitely abandoned the disgusting theory 
that the Church has any right to use material force, and 
came to the Lateran for his enthronement, not merely 
over Rome, but over Christendom, which, under a Pope 



THE LATERAN 199 

who could say " soldiers and swords have I none " might 
come to be reunited ? 

Our view of the Basilica Salvatoris, now known as S. 
John Lateran, was not a very good one : at the time we 
were in Rome repairs of some kind were in progress at the 
Lateran, and the whole nave was blocked with gigantic 
scaffolding. The result is that I have no impression of the 
dignity, of the size of the mother-church of Rome. Nor 
did the details compensate for this piece of ill-luck. The 
Gothic tabernacle is fine, no doubt, and is a beautiful 
example of careful workmanship ; but it lacks the imagina- 
tive warmth of northern Gothic, and has not the charm 
of S. Maria sopra Minerva, or the subtle feeling of the 
great Paschal Candlestick at San Paolo. The mosaics 
in the apse, while astonishingly true in colour, miss 
something of that character which distinguishes those in 
San Clemente. I felt about the whole surroundings of the 
Lateran as though it was a place deserted ; the building 
was desolate, the singing — we got in for a little of Vespers 
— far more perfunctory than the rendering of the Choir 
Office at San Pietro, and about the whole church there 
was an indescribable air of the museum, of the show-place, 
and of a rather huffed dignity. It is in this last, I believe, 
that the real secret of the Lateran lies hid ; Dominic 
insists that I am too fantastic, that I must not, after 
having given a soul to the Campagna, invest the Lateran 
with personal pride — but I cannot think I am far out. 
For so many centuries now the Papa Orbis Terrarum has 
been gradually displacing the Bishop of Rome : the great 
breach came, in the days of Pio Nono, when Giovanni 
Maria Mastai-Feretti definitely decided that the claims of 
Rome must yield to the claims of the Papacy. All his 
heart, all his conviction were on the side of the patriots 
and the rising ; but were not the Austrians also his sub- 
jects, and good Catholics too ? And so the legend of the 



200 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE 

Liberal Pope came to an abrupt and untimely end. We 
hardly realize now how firmly Liberals believed in the 
Papacy in those days, when the glorious revolution was 
yet young, when the leaders of the people were priests 
and friars, and when the Mass was the password for the 
children of democracy. Robert Browning, Dissenter and 
Radical and poet, could write to Monckton Milnes, when 
the question of an embassy from England to the Vatican 
was thought of in 1847, " that he would be glad and proud 
to be secretary to such an embassy and to work like a 
horse " for it : but Pio Nono soon abandoned the 
Liberal cause, and years afterguards, when he was definitely 
and irrevocably on the side of the oppressor, he began 
what Ultramontanes called his *' passion," by ascending 
the Scala Santa. 

That last visit of Pio Nono to the Holy Staircase marks 
the final victory of the Vatican over the Lateran, of the 
Pope over the Bishop. Since that fatal year we have had 
the legend of the imprisoned Pope ; the girding, childish, 
hysterical quarrels between Black and White ; the un- 
christian hatred of the King and the State officials. This 
has affected the ancient basilica of Constantine ; it 
mourns, robbed of its ruler, and will not be comforted, nor 
recover its old pride of place and dignity of life until some 
free Pope, with free ideas, proceeds in solemn order from 
the Vatican to San Giovanni in Laterano, to be crowned 
Bishop of Rome and enthroned as chief pastor in the 
church which is, of all churches in the city. Mother and 
Head. 

Even although it can scarcely be true that Constantine 
was baptized in the baptistery of the Lateran, the building 
is in origin of the fifth century, and possibly of the fourth. 
I love the great buildings with which the early Christians 
paid homage to the first great sacrament. To-day we are 
too used to baptism and its consequences ; it needs a 



THE LATERAN 201 

residence in a non-Christian country to realize exactly 
what is given in baptism, and what an enormous dif- 
ference the grace of God does make. We, ignoring or 
forgetting all this, make but little of the Sacrament of 
the New Birth. A few recent churches and cathedrals 
have large baptistery chapels — but how rare is the grave- 
like font, in which even an adult can be immersed, how 
frequent is the contemptuous dismissal of the font — some 
poor, cheap little basin — to a dim corner of an obscure 
transept ! S. Giovanni in Fonte is a great and agreeable 
contrast to the policy that neglects baptism : here you 
have a beautiful building set apart entirely for the re- 
ception of people into the Church of God. At one time 
it was the only baptistery in Rome, and here Csedwalla 
must have been baptized in 689. At present it is still 
used, and on the afternoon we were there a baptism 
occurred, a most slovenly and irreverent ceremony, I am 
sorry to say, the only thing we saw in a place of worship 
that really disgusted us. Why is it that people are so 
fond of insisting on the irreverent character of the services 
in Rome ? Either my friends must have been very 
particular, or Dominic and I were very lucky ; for we 
practically, save for this one service, saw nothing in Rome 
that could shock or wound. I remember that one friend 
of mine, rather an ardent '* black," urged me not to go 
and hear the Divine office at San Pietro : he assured me 
that when he went the canons talked and laughed and 
spat and behaved disgracefully. Well, Dominic and I did 
go — on the eve of the Circumcision — and heard Vespers : 
there were six rulers of the choir, I think ; a very fair 
number of canons, and a good congregation. I won't 
pretend to assert that no one's attention ever wandered 
during the recitation of the Psalter : but I will say that 
I have seen many services in England rendered with 
infinitely less ease and reverence. *' Ease " is perhaps 
the thing which disturbs some English people ; the 



202 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE 

Italian may not be terribly at ease in Zion ; but he is 
amazingly at ease in the courts of the temple. I mean 
he is not so positive, as are many English, about the 
extent and the quality of the Padre Eterno's interest in 
his own peculiar concerns ; but he has a very conscious 
and certain feeling that he has a right to his place in the 
sanctuary, and that there is no use in pretending before 
Domeniddio to be any better than he is. Therein, I 
suppose, lies the real quarrel between the English and 
other nations on such a question as " Sunday clothes." 
No sensible Christian objects to the sound idea that a man 
(ay, and a woman, too) should put on his best things when 
he goes to visit God — but it is an objectionable thing to 
put on garments so unusual for you that they practically 
disguise your personality, and cause your neighbour, if 
he be sensible, amazement and amusement, and, if he be 
stupid, envy and black hatred. In England too often 
the one prevailing reason against going to church is the 
absence of ** best clothes " : and that is mere idolatry of a 
very low description. It is possible to overdo the attitude 
of ease ; indeed directly it becomes an attitude it will 
become a fault, but the baptism at San Giovanni betrayed 
not so much ease as indifference, insolence and careless- 
ness. There was none of that tender affection of the child 
so often shown at English baptism which makes the 
service so beautiful a one to watch : of course the Roman 
service, with its numerous exorcisms, does not tend to 
dignity — for nothing is more wearisome than a perfunctory 
exorcism ; if you are really going to expel a devil, you 
should do it with some pomp and show of magnificence. 
Still, the little man who was chosen as the minister of 
holy baptism that afternoon was exceptional in his power 
of belittling and spoiling a service that is in itself capable 
of being one of the most beautiful in the Christian religion. 
Of the oratories of the baptistery by far the most 
attractive is that of S. Giovanni Evangelista (who, by the 



THE LATERAN 203 

way, was added to the patrons of the basilica), with its 
doors of bronze, and its glorious glow of mosaic. Other- 
wise the thing that attracted us most was the actual font 
of green basalt. It has witnessed many historic baptisms ; 
but certainly nothing stranger than the mystical prepara- 
tion of Cola di Rienzo on ist August 1347. On the night 
before he summoned the Electors of Germany to come 
before him for judgment the last of the tribunes bathed in 
Constantine's basalt basin ; and then on the next day pro- 
ceeded to the basilica to issue his citation, and on the day 
after be crowned with the seven crowns.^ 

1 Surely prouder words never sounded through the great cathedral: 

"Be it known that in virtue of that authority, power, and 
jurisdiction which the Roman people, in general parliament, have 
assigned to us, and which the Sovereign Pontiff hath confirmed, 
that we, not ungrateful of the gift and grace of the Holy Spirit — 
whose soldier we now are — nor of the favour of the Roman people, 
declare that Rome, capital of the world, and base of the Christian 
Church ; and that every City, State and People of Italy, are 
henceforth free. By that freedom, and in that same consecrated 
authority, we proclaim that the election, jurisdiction, and 
monarchy of the Roman Empire appertain to Rome and Rome's 
people, and the whole of Italy. We cite, then, and summon 
personally, the illustrious prince, Ludwig Duke of Bavaria, and 
Karl King of Bohemia, who would style themselves Emperors of 
Italy, to appear before us, or the other magistrates of Rome, to 
plead and to prove their claim between this day and the day of 
Pentecost. We cite also, and within the same term, the Duke of 
Saxony, the Prince of Brandenburg, and whosoever else, potentate, 
or prelate, asserts the right of Elector to the Imperial Throne — 
a right that, we find it chronicled from ancient and immemorial 
time, appertaineth only to the Roman people — and this in vindi- 
cation of our civil liberties, without derogation of the spiritual 
power of the Church, the Pontiff and the Sacred College."' 

After this formal act Rienzi, dizzy with power and prosperity, 
turned his sword to the three quarters of the known world and said, 
amid the hush of the great concourse : " In the name of the people 
of Rome this too is mine ! ** 

For this ceremony see Gibbon ; and for a picturesque account 
(I have taken Rienzi's speech thence), Lord Lytton's " Rienzi." 



204 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE 

The Church of Our Lady of the Snow, commonly known 
as Santa Maria Maggiore, has one of the prettiest and 
most baseless of sacred fairy stories connected with its 
foundations. Somewhere about 352 there lived in Rome 
a patrician named Johannes. He and his wife were 
devout Christians, and childless. John was a man of some 
wealth, and owned a good deal of property on the Esquiline 
Hill. The pious couple had given up any hope of having 
children ; and apparently had no other near relatives to 
whom they felt inclined to leave their goods. So they 
decided to present all their property to Our Blessed Lady, 
and were anxious in endeavouring to discover what form 
Mary would like the gift to take. On 5th August the pair 
had retired to bed discussing the momentous question as 
to how they should make this gift ; and no doubt gently 
arguing with each other, husband and wife each urging 
particular and favourite schemes. During their sleep 
Our Lady appeared in a vision. She said that she wished 
to settle their friendly disputes, and so gave them the 
following directions : — "Go to-morrow morning to the 
Esquiline Hill, and there you will find a portion of the 
ground marked out in snow. Build me a church thereon." 
Snow, of course, is unusual in Rome at any time, and very 
rare during the month of August ; and so, as a modern 
Jesuit ingenuously remarks, ** a fall of snow at that season 
could only happen by a miracle." 

I regret to say that, according to the legend, John and 
his wife did not go straight to the Esquiline. I am sure 
his wife wanted to — ^but no doubt she was overruled, and 
very likely her husband insisted that Our Lady had not 
expressly said they were to go first thing to the hill. Any- 
way, before doing anything, they went to Pope Liberius 
and informed him of their dream. By a curious chance, 
the Holy Father had received on the same night informa- 
tion from Our Lady that he was to help John and his wife 
in the pious work that she had instructed them to do. So 



THE LATERAN 205 

the Pope and his clergy, and the people, and John the 
patrician and his wife went to the Esquiline on 6th 
August 352, and there found the snow even as they had 
been told. And on the snow was clearly marked in outline 
a plan of the church. The basiHca was started straight 
away, and completed in 360. 

Such is the story, dating from about the thirteenth 
century, of the foundation of the largest church in Rome, 
which is dedicated in the name of the Mother of God. 
While the story bears all the marks of being unhistorical, 
it is very curious to explain why anyone should invent a 
tale of August snow in Rome in order to account for the 
building of a church that certainly had existed from the 
time of the Council at Ephesus. It is just possible that 
the story was invented to explain the popular name, S. 
Maria ad Nives. But how did the church get this name ? 
The original pre-Sixtine basilica (if there was one) was 
called Basilica Liberiana after Pope Liberius, whose dream 
so conveniently agreed with that of the donors. Sixtus III., 
who built a church here in 431 or 432, called it Sancta 
Maria Mater Dei, in commemoration of the title of Theo- 
tokos, recently secured to Our Lady by the Council of 
Ephesus : another title is Sancta Maria ad Praesepe 
(Mary of the Manger), from the fact that it contains the 
holy manger of Bethlehem ; and yet another, now the 
commonest, S. Maria Maggiore, because it is the principal 
church of Our Lady, excepting the one at Loretto. Whence 
then the title of S. Maria ad Nives ? I have had it suggested 
to me that the name is a simple mistake. It will be remem- 
bered that after the condemnation of Nestorianism at 
Ephesus there was a great scene of rejoicing in Constanti- 
nople. The decree was read in the Church of the Holy 
Wisdom ; and on hearing it the people exclaimed : 
" Nestorius has fallen ; the Holy Council and she who is 
Mother of God according to the flesh have overthrown 
Nestorius ! Mary the Holy Virgin has excommunicated 



2o6 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE 

Nestorius ! Mary is Mother of God after the flesh ; she 
has rent Nestorius in pieces." ^ This is one of the eariiest 
signs that the conception of Mary as terrible, Mary as an 
army arrayed, was gaining ground among Christians : 
it is not impossible that the Pope heard of these events of 
July 431, and called his church not only Sancta Maria 
Mater Dei, but Sancta Maria ad vires — Our Lady of 
Strength. I doubt myself if this suggestion is more than 
plausible ; for one thing the Latin is of rather more than 
doubtful quality. You would expect " de viribus," as in 
*' S. Maria de bono consilio." Still it is just possible that 
" ad vires " was a popular name for the basilica, and that 
it afterwards, when people had forgotten this title and used 
Maggiore or ad Praesepe, got altered in some manuscript 
to ad nives, and so brought forth the legend of the August 
snow. 

The church with its gay, bright interior is the most 
beautiful, in some ways, of the five great churches which, 
with S. Croce in Gerusalemme and San Sebastiano, 
formed the special objects of pilgrimage. We went 
straight to look at the mosaics on the great arch. Whether 
they are of the time of Sixtus IIL, or earlier, of the days 
to which Dr Richter and Miss Taylor have assigned them, 
together with the magnificent series in the nave, I do not 
much care. There is only one point I should like to urge 
against the earlier date. 

Dr Richter argues that the artistic tone of the nave 
mosaics is akin to the times of Marcus Aurelius and 
Septimus Severus ; and that the ideas expressed in them 
belong to the thought we connect with Justin Martyr, 
Irenseus and S. Clement of Alexandria, not to the theo- 
logians of the fifth century. I cannot myself see that any 
case has been made out of the subjects of the nave mosaics ; 

^Church Quarterly Review, October 1891. The Council of 
Ephesus. 



THE LATERAN 207 

they are biblical and belong to the old dispensation ; now 
it cannot be asseverated that the fifth-century doctors 
abandoned the use of the Old Testament, or that their 
allegorical system is noticeably different from that of the 
earlier fathers. Also I am afraid I suspect a theory which 
can find one line of thought running through such different 
writers as Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, and S. Clement of 
Alexandria. Nevertheless it is not easy to disprove Dr 
Richter's suggestion about the nave mosaics : but when 
we reach those of the arch he has a much harder task to 
make good his contention. 

One of the most remarkable things about early Christian 
art is the lateness of Madonna's appearance in it : with the 
exception of one or two representations in the Catacombs 
there is nothing before the fourth century, and very little 
till the fifth and sixth. On the arch of S. Maria there is the 
Annunciation, with Mary and Joseph ; and there is the 
Adoration of the Magi, with the traditional three, not four, 
as in the Catacombs. Of course these points are not 
conclusive ; but, considering that the tradition of the 
church's foundation puts it so much later than the 
second century, it strikes me that this early date, 
much as one would like to accept it, is not historically 
probable. 

However, the mosaics, these old ones, and also the 
gorgeous thirteenth-century ones in the semidome, alone 
give S. Maria Maggiore a peculiar splendour. Before 
these the mosaics of San Clemente must bow ; and the 
only thing I know to compare to them is the modern work 
of an English artist, the mosaic by Burne- Jones (spoiled 
though it is by another's additions) in the Church of the 
American Embassy. The mosaics help infinitely in the 
air of joy fulness with which the whole church is full : this 
basilica partakes of the May-like, festive character which 
Cardinal Newman notes as the mark of Catholic devotion 
to Mary. And the true significance of the mosaics and of 



2o8 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE 

the church is struck by the two inscriptions in the semi- 
dome : 

" Maria Virgo assupta ad ethereu thalamo in quo Rex Regu 
stellato sedet solio," 

and 

*' Exaltata est Sancta Dei Genetrix super choros angelorum ad 
coelestia regna." 

The spirit of the great church is continued in the chapels, 
especially the Paoline, or Borghese, Chapel, where every 5th 
August a shower of white rose leaves reminds the sceptical 
people of the story of the snow. Here is kept one of those 
Byzantine pictures of Mary which tradition ascribes to 
S. Luke. There is the Sistine Chapel, beneath whose altar 
is the relic of the Holy Crib, and where is a horrid statue 
of S. Cajetan by Bernini : it was at the altar of this chapel 
that Ignatius Loyola, soldier of Jesus and Mary, said his 
first Mass at the midnight of Christmas 1538. Here is 
preserved, uncorrupt, the body of Pius V., whom English- 
men can scarcely remember with reverence ; no doubt he 
was a saint, but alas ! he was a grievously tactless one. 
And here, too, but in an unknown spot, lies the body of 
the great S. Jerome, translated thither from Bethlehem in 
640 : it is only Rome who can thus afford to forget the 
resting-place of so great a saint, after having secured his 
relics, and I think that even Rome has to pay the penalty 
for thus neglecting the man who gave her her Bible. 

There are two rather charming legends connected with 
this church and S. Gregory. Somehow these stories that 
gather round S. Maria Maggiore are not so annoying as 
many apocryphal tales. During the great plague of 590 
the Romans were dying by their hundreds, calling in vain 
on the saints and on their bishop for help. Pope Gregory 
determined that the disaster was an occasion for a proces- 
sion of penance : that God was angry with His people. 



THE LATERAN 209 

So seven great processions were organized. From the 
Church of SS. Cosmas and Damian came the clergy of 
Rome ; from SS. Gervase and Protasius came the monks ; 
the nuns left the old Church of SS. Marcellinus and Peter ; 
the widows came from S. Euphemia; the laymen from 
S. Stephen ; the matrons from S. Clement, and the children 
from S. Vitalis. With the first procession walked the 
Holy Father, carrying in his hands the picture of Our 
Lady that now rests in the Borghese Chapel. Through 
the streets of the city, the city full of dead and dying, 
went the companies of men and women and children. 
" De profundis " and " Miserere " swelled out over the 
housetops in the gorgeous rhythm that S. Gregory himself 
perfected. As the procession approached the Church of 
Ara Coeli the Pope heard from above — the angels' song, 
the legend calls it — the beginning of the Paschal anthem, 
** Regina coeli, laetare ! Alleluia ! Quia, quem meruisti 
port are, Alleluia ! Resurrexit, sicut dixit. Alleluia ! " 
The angels ceased and the Pope, grieving over the sins and 
sorrows of his people, raised the holy picture to heaven 
and cried out, " Ora pro nobis Deum. Alleluia ! " So 
that is why the rhythm of the "Regina Coeli," which 
at Eastertide is substituted for the Angelus, has become 
rather halting. 

The answer to the Pope's prayer came later on. The 
procession went its way towards the Vatican. As it was 
crossing the bridge that leads to Hadrian's Mausoleum 
Gregory looked up and saw Michael the Archangel on the 
summit of the Moles sheathing his sword : and to this day 
Michael stands upon the top, as he stood to announce to 
Gregory the cessation of the plague. 

The other story is also a tale of the angels. 

S. Gregory was singing Mass on Easter Day (Christmas, 
Easter and the Assumption are (or rather were) the days 
on which the Holy Father came to S. Maria Maggiore) and 
his first ** Pax vobiscum " was answered, not by the 



210 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE 

deacons — perhaps they were inattentive, or missed their 
note — ^but by a choir of angels, who sang in reply, " Et 
cum spirit u tuo." I have heard that while the Pope still 
visited S. Maria the pretty custom was observed, when he 
sang Mass, of leaving the response, " Et cum spiritu tuo," 
to be sung by the angels. How many churches there are 
where that might be done with advantage ! And indeed 
one would willingly leave rather more than those four 
words to the angelic choir ; I am sure it would be a com- 
fort to many an English congregation, but organists and 
the rulers of places where they sing would be likely to 
oppose the introduction of a body of singers over whom 
even they could scarcely claim control. 




PIAZZA BARHKKIM 



CHAPTER XI 

TWO ROMAN MARTYRS 

THERE were three reasons that impelled us to go to 
San Lorenzo. First, it was one of the five great 
churches; secondly, S. Lawrence and his story attract 
one even more than most of the early martyrologies ; 
and thirdly, I wanted to see the tomb of Pius IX., 
who, with all his faults, remains the most lovable of the 
nineteenth-century pontiffs. 

I am afraid my S. Lawrence is very unlike the quiet, 
tender, youthful figure of the average hagiographer. I 
do not think it likely that the Archdeacon of Rome in the 
middle of the third century was an unfledged boy who 
went gaily and piously down to his terrible death. 

Let us recall the circumstances. Sixtus XL, Bishop of 
Rome, was presented with a large sum of mone^^ by 
Philip, son of the Emperor Philip : the Pope was brought 
before Decius, who had murdered the Emperor and put 
young Philip to flight, and ordered to surrender the 
treasure. Sixtus got wind of Decius' intention to im- 
prison him and so decided to hand over the treasure to 
Lawrence. The Archdeacon was then a man in the prime 
of his youth ; strong, bearded, fearless. No doubt in 
times of peace he had occasionally been thought a little 
boisterous, a little too hearty for the weaker Christians. 
The Pope, however, seeing his strength of character, had 
insisted on making him his Archdeacon, and now, with 
persecution imminent, handed into his keeping the treasure 
of the Church. The transfer was only just effected ; 

211 



212 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE 

then before Sixtus had time to give any instructions, the 
Roman guard thundered on the door, and Lawrence, with 
the treasure, evaded at the back, while Sixtus was haled 
away to prison. With his master imprisoned, Lawrence 
was in a quandary. He was not a man of great power of 
thought ; he had no particular aptitude for anything but 
business and the control of people — he was embarrassed 
by the money with which he was left. He did what many 
others placed in a similar position might well do : he 
knew that he, as Archdeacon, was responsible for the 
Church during the Bishop's imprisonment, so he prayed, 
and consulted the Holy Gospels. He found there : *' Give 
to him that asketh thee," and " The poor ye have always 
with you." Of course ! the poor ! Immediately he 
began to distribute the wealth of Philip to the poor 
among the community ; and he discovered, as he was 
occupied in almsgiving, that he had the gift of healing, 
and so he cured many of their diseases, and washed their 
feet, in imitation of his Blessed Lord. The great, 
rough, strong man gave no thought to the attraction 
his behaviour was certain to excite. By this time Decius 
had discovered that Sixtus had not got the treasure — 
and suddenly reports reached him of the actions of the 
Archdeacon. Still it seemed unlikely that Sixtus would 
leave the treasure — no doubt meant to be carefully 
guarded — to a man who had no better use for it than to 
squander it on a horde of beggars : so Decius did not 
immediately attack Lawrence. It does not seem certain 
that Lawrence would ever have suffered martyrdom if 
it had not been for his own action. Decius determined to 
try what he could do by playing on Lawrence's affection 
for his bishop. Sixtus knew nothing of the treasure, did 
he not ? Very well, let him be executed ! And the Pope 
was taken away to be beheaded. The rumour of it reached 
Lawrence ; his plans for the poor, his difficultly acquired 
quietness, his charge of the Church were forgotten : he 



TWO ROMAN MARTYRS 213 

came running up to the gaoler, as they were marching 
Sixtus to death, crying " Take me too ! Take me too ! I 
have had the wealth ; and I have given it all away ! Let 
me die with my bishop ! " 

The guard had been told what they were to do in the 
case of Lawrence's interference ; he was immediately 
arrested, and put into prison, under the charge of Hip- 
politus. Hippolitus and a fellow-prisoner, Lucillius, were 
both converted and baptized in a spring which Lawrence 
discovered in the cell : the Church of S. Lorenzo in Fonte 
now marks the spot. 

Two days later, after Decius had made fruitless in- 
quiries among the terrified Christians and satisfied 
himself that the treasure, if it was hidden, was very well 
hidden, he called Lawrence before him. 

No doubt the Archdeacon was a little abashed when he 
first appeared in the court, and Decius thought it would 
be easy to get out of this boorish-looking fellow informa- 
tion as to the whereabouts of the treasure. It was no 
use beating about the bush, so he had the question put 
directly to Lawrence : *' Where is the treasure ? " 

" And what treasure is that, O Mightiness ? " 

" The treasure which that son of a bitch, Philip, gave 
to your bishop, Sixtus." 

** Ah ! that treasure has been distributed to the poor 
among us Christians." 

Decius gave a movement of impatience. He had 
heard that story before ; he had never quite believed it, 
and now he saw Lawrence he was less inclined to believe 
it than ever. No doubt the fellow had hidden the treasure 
for his own use, somewhere. He nodded to his officer : 
and then began himself to question Lawrence. 

" It will be better for you, Lawrence, to let me know 
immediately where the treasure is. It was clever of you 
to start giving alms directly I had imprisoned Sixtus ; 
it might have deceived some — but it does not deceive me. 



214 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE 

Now let one of my men, or let one of your own people, 
fetch the treasure here to me now, and you shall not only 
be forgiven, but rewarded." 

When he had finished Decius noticed that Lawrence was 
perceptibly hesitating. " Nay," he went on, " if you 
care for it, you shall have an ofhce about our person. 
Sixtus knew a proper man when he saw one." 

*' If my lord will allow me, I will send one of my own 
people, and the treasure of the Church shall be brought 
to my Lord." Decius sank back, smiling a satisfied 
assent. Lawrence looked round, and saw in the crowd a 
fellow-Christian whose courage and faithfulness he could 
trust. He called the man, who came forward. The 
guards stood cautiously by, while Lawrence whispered 
instructions in his friend's ear. The man nodded rapid 
comprehension and scampered away, grinning joyfully. 

" The Church's treasure will be here in five minutes," 
he said to Decius. 

In almost exactly five minutes a great noise was heard 
outside the court ; people scuffling and laughing and pro- 
testing, and, piping above the roar, the shrill cry of the 
blind and the strange hoarse sounds of the dumb. Then 
a lane was made in the great crush, and the tap of a 
cripple's crutch was heard as he swung himself forward 
towards the bema. " Where is Lawrence our friend, 
Lawrence the benefactor of the poor ? " And the lame 
man came boldly up and stood beside the Archdeacon. 
He was followed by a small tumult of poverty-stricken 
and diseased people, who with various cries of greeting 
and pleasure remained in front of Decius, who glanced 
angrily at them, and then stuttered out to Lawrence : 

" What the devil do you mean by this damned joke ? 
Don't you know that I have power to let you go, and 
power to bum you, ay, and torture you first ? " 

" Thou would' St have no power," murmured Lawrence, 
before answering, " except it was given thee from above. 



TWO ROMAN MARTYRS 215 

My Lord," he went on in a louder voice, " asked for the 
treasures of the Church. Ecce ! " 

Bafifled and furious, Decius, his little pig's eyes blood- 
shot and blinking, rose from his chair. " The sacrifice," 
he ordered hoarsely. 

Then Lawrence was brought before the image of 
Caesar, and ordered to burn incense. He refused. Then 
came forward stout men with whips of hide, and he was 
trussed up to a pillar, and flogged until the whips were 
sticky with blood, and his back was clad in purple, like 
the purple that clothed his Divine Master. Still he 
refused to burn incense, or to speak a word about the 
treasure. At the back of the court the poor, and the 
other Christians stood, speaking only in breathless 
whispers as they watched that great muscular body being 
flayed and flung into pieces by the Roman soldiers. 

Decius, gloating over the tortures, was yet still fuller 
of greed than of cruelty ; will nothing, he thought, induce 
this brute, coarse and insensitive as he is, to speak about 
the treasure ? 

" Fire," he demanded from the attendants. Then a 
brazier was brought in, and while Lawrence's wounds were 
slowly ceasing to bleed, and the gore was congealing on 
the raw flesh, irons were heated in the brazier. Then the 
slaves put them against his flesh. A low sob rose from 
the Christians, but never a sound from the tortured man. 
Decius, after a few moments, saw that this too would 
avail nothing. He hastily called a dozen of his guard and 
sent them to the spot on the slope of the Esquiline, where 
S. Lorenzo in Panisperna now stands. They went off, 
and there prepared the great gridiron on which the saint 
was to meet his death. Lawrence was then released 
from his pillar, and dragged along to the place selected. 
There his body, already broken and maimed, was bound 
with chains on the gridiron ; and the fire was lit under him. 
As he felt death, certain and cruel, inevitably approaching, 



2i6 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE 

the great-hearted Archdeacon had a desire to speak 
again ; he could not resist the opportunity of a last gibe 
at the devil and his works, and his poor human minister. 
His body was now little more than a blackened and 
smoking coal — a coal from which the Christians around 
discerned a sweet fragrance to arise — but he turned his 
scorched countenance towards Decius, and the greedy 
judge saw that his victim wished to speak. 

Decius' head swam with joy. Could it be that at last 
the man's spirit had failed him ? He approached as near 
as he dared to the glowing mass, and put an avid ear to 
catch the burning man's hoarse, cracked words — and this 
is what he heard : 

" Decius, turn me over, will you ? I'm done enough on 
this side." And then, with a smile at his little joke, 
Lawrence fell asleep in Jesus, murmuring a brief prayer 
for the conversion of his native city. 

When Sixtus had appointed Lawrence his Archdeacon 
there had been a little trouble with some of the more 
cultured Christians ; and, in particular, Cyriaca, whose 
steward Lawrence was, rather resented losing a good ser- 
vant, and also having a menial put into such a position. 
Of course she knew that all Christians were equal in the 
Lord ; but still it was useless completely to ignore social 
distinctions, or how would society get on ? Sixtus 
talked to her like a father ; and Cyriaca had nearly 
become reconciled to seeing Lawrence chief assistant 
at the Solemn Eucharists. Then came the poor dear 
Bishop's arrest, and that stupid Lawrence, instead of 
j&ghting, which he could do, ran away with all the money. 
No doubt he did give it away again to the poor : but how 
improvident that was ! Still what else could one expect 
from a person of that class ? 

Then Cyriaca was told about Lawrence's capture. 
" Big, silly man," she exclaimed, *' why couldn't he keep 
out of the soldiers' way ? It was really almost suicide, 



TWO ROMAN MARTYRS 217 

to go throwing oneself into danger like that ! " But in 
her heart, her really converted heart — for there are lots 
of people who have converted hearts and yet find it 
very difficult to convert their externals — she was lost in 
admiration of her ex-steward ; and she kept herself 
acquainted with every detail of the horrible tortures. At 
last she could stand it no longer, and, disguised, she 
flipped round to Decius' court : as she approached she 
heard the marching of many feet, and there came out 
of the palace the grisly procession, with Lawrence dragged, 
bleeding, helpless in the middle of it. Cyriaca followed, 
agonized in prayer. She halted with the rest of the 
crowd outside the gates : she saw the murder ; she heard 
the taunt to Decius — and no sooner was the breath out of 
Lawrence's body than she turned and disclosed herself 
to the mean and cruel judge. 

" My lady, you here ! Ah ! I forgot " 

" Yes, Decius, I am a Christian. Do you want to serve 
me as you have served that hero ? " 

" The gods forbid, lady ! I had forgotten for a moment 
your interest in this strange cult. Still I have executed 
Lawrence simply for contumely and insolence, and also 
for blaspheming against the genius of Caesar. As you 
know, I am the most tolerant of men, and " 

" Decius, may I have this body taken to my estate 
for burial ? " 

" On the Celian, dear lady ? It would be rather 
irregular " 

*' No ! God forbid that he should lie within your cursed 
city. I mean my estate outside the walls. Do you give 
permission ? " 

'* But certainly ! And if I can do anything 
else " 

" Nothing," and Cyriaca turned away from Decius, 
who went back and told his companions that the beautiful 
matron Cyriaca cherished a curious affection for her 



2i8 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE 

ex-steward. " And he too," the beast hiccoughed, as 
the wine went round, " he too was rather enflamed." 

Over that tomb has sprung the Basihca of San Lorenzo. 
Its first interest is the mosaic-work in the portico, which 
tells the story of the saint's torture and martyrdom. 
Within the church the chief beauty is the way in which 
different styles are assimilated without any feeling of 
lack of harmony ; it is a church in which one has the 
distinct impression of a unity gained through diversity. 
The columns, even when they are of the same period, are 
not uniform, and yet they never clash. Nor does the 
sixth-century mosaic quarrel with the beautiful mediaeval 
ciborium and ambones. 

The church has always kept up its reputation of being 
the church of the poor, and it was for this reason that Pio 
Nono, most democratic of popes in sentiment, desired to 
be buried here. He gave orders that his tomb should be 
simple ; and so it is — but the walls of the chapel where 
he lies buried are covered with mosaics and gorgeous with 
coats-of-arms. He is guarded by a rather curious com- 
pany of saints — Peter and Lawrence, Agnes and Cyriaca, 
Francis of Sales and Alfonso Liguori, Catherine of Siena, 
Joseph, and Francis of Assisi, and Stephen and Paul. It 
is significant of modem Romanism that among the chosen 
guardians of the Pope of the Vatican Council there should 
be only two mediaeval saints, and neither of those theo- 
logians. The religion of modem Rome has plenty in 
common, on its practical side, with the religion of the 
primitive Church ; and its theology and devotion are at 
home with Liguori and Sales — but Benedict, Thomas, 
Anselmo, somehow^ the historical sense does not get them 
and their compeers fitted into the Ultramontane system. 

That gentle and beautiful saint, Caecilia, died some years 
before Lawrence, in the pontificate of Urban (it is a pleasant 
coincidence that two such wonderful women as Caecilia and 



TWO ROMAN MARTYRS 219 

Catherine should each be connected with a Pope Urban) ; 
her story has been told supremely in English by Chaucer, 
but yet still suffers from the ready pen of the hagiographer. 

Caecilia is a saint who always appeals even to the non- 
Catholic. Ruskin says in his fine, careless way — that 
holds so much of kindly truth and sincerity : " With much 
more clearness and historic comfort we may approach the 
shrine of S. Caecilia ; and even on the most prosaic and 
realistic minds — such as my own — a visit to the house 
in Rome has a comforting and establishing effect, which 
reminds one of the carter in 'Harry and Lucy' who is con- 
vinced of the truth of a plaustral catastrophe at first 
incredible to him, as soon as he hears the name of the hill 
on which it happened." ^ 

Caecilia, who was a patrician, was born in the early years 
of the third century. At this time the power of virginity 
was beginning to make itself felt in the early Church. 
The example of Our Blessed Lady was causing a great 
many Christian girls to prefer a virgin life — forgetting that 
Mary was mother as well as maiden — and the belief in 
the imminence of the Second Advent, not yet wholly 
abandoned, gave an added impetus against the state of 
holy matrimony. Ideas of this kind were agitating the 
house of Caecilia' s parents when the girl was getting on 
towards fifteen years of age. Her mother, a devout woman 
but rather stupid, was determined that Caecilia should 
remain a virgin, and the maiden in her youthful eagerness 
and zeal for Christ agreed : however, her father was 
opposed to this plan. The family was one of senatorial 
rank and he had a good match in his eye for his little 
Caecilia. He too was stupid, but in a different way. 
Whether Caecilia' s father was a Christian or not seems to be 
uncertain, but at any rate he persuaded Caecilia to become 
betrothed to a pagan named Valerian. 

Now Caecilia' s mother had not abandoned her plan for 
^ '* Pleasures of England," iv. 



220 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE 

her daughter, and so, as a thoroughly good woman 
sometimes will, she conceived the wicked idea of letting 
Caecilia marry Valerian, but being his wife in nothing but 
name. I cannot but think that the mother also invented 
the story to be told Valerian. Here is Chaucer's account 
of the marriage : 

" And when this mayde schuld unto a man 
Y- wedded be, that was ful yong of age. 
Which that y-cleped was Valerian, 
And day was comen of hir marriage, 
Sche ful devout and humble in hir currage. 
Under hir robe of gold, that sat ful faire, 
Hadde next hir fieissh i-clad hir in an heire. 

And whil the organs made melodie, 
To God alone in herte thus sang sche ; 

* O Lord, my soule and eek my body gye 
Unwemmed, lest that I confounded be,' ^ 
And for his love that deyde upon a tre. 
Every secounde or thridde day sche faste. 
Ay bidding in hire orisouns ful faste. 

The nyght cam, and to bedde moste sche goon 
With hir housbond, as oft is the manere. 
And prively to him sche sayde anoon ; 

* O sweet and wel biloved spouse deere. 
There is a counseil, and ye wold it heere, 
Which that right fayn I wold unto you saye. 
So that ye swere ye schuld it not bywraye.' 

Valerian gan fast unto hir swere. 
That for no cas ne thing that mighte be, 
He scholde never-mo bywraye hir ; 
And thanne at erst thus to him sayde sche ; 
' I have an Aungel which that loveth me, 
That with gret love, wher so I wake or slepe, 
Is redy ay my body for to kepe ; 

And yif that he may felen, oute of drede 
That ye me touche or love in vilonye, 

1 Cantantibus organis, CagciUa virgo in corde suo soH Domino 
decantabat, dicens, - Fiat, Domine, cor meum et corpus meum 
immaculatum, ut non confundar.'* — Breviary, Ofl&ce for S. 
Caecilia's Day. 



TWO ROMAN MARTYRS 221 

He right anoun will sle you with the dede, 
And in your youthe thus schulde ye dye. 
And if that ye in clene love me gye, 
He wul you love as me, for your clennesse, 
And schewe to you his joye and his brightnesse.' 

Valerian, corrected as God wolde, 
Answerde agayn : * If I schal truste thee, 
Let me that Aungel se, and him biholde ; 
And if that it a verray aungel be, 
Then wol I doon as thou hast prayed me ; 
And if thou love another man forsothe 
Right with this sword than wol I slee you bo the.' " 

Valerian, although he was a pagan, was a gentleman. 
He realized, no doubt, the trick that had been played upon 
him, and he never for a moment, I fancy, suspected 
this quiet girl of fifteen, who chattered such divine non- 
sense about angels, to have had any hand in cheating him 
out of a wife. Something in her way of telling her story 
must have impressed him, or else he hoped that by investi- 
gating the tale he could find out some of the disgraceful 
secrets of the cult his wife and her people had got mixed 
up in : so when Caecilia, in answer to his humorous 
threat, " Show me the angel," told him to go along the 
Appian Way and there ask for Urban ^ from some cripples 
and poor people by the third milestone, he started off. 

At the third milestone he saw a group of dirty, poor- 
looking people, who shrank away from his martial bearing 
and rather insolent appearance. He approached them 
and spoke as his wife had bidden him. ** Caecilia has sent 
me to you : lead me to the holy old man Urban ; for I 
have a secret message from her to him." The Christians 
knew that Caecilia had been recently married and guessed 
that this was her husband, and he was taken to Urban. 
He went to him, hoping to bring back some disgraceful 
secret, some scandal that would give him power to open 

* Not the Pope, but another bishop who was then in hiding in 
the Catacombs. 



222 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE 

his wife's eyes ; he left the bishop a baptized and con- 
verted man, and hastened to his wife, to tell her the good 
news. It was only in ignorance, we may be sure, that 
Caecilia had lent herself to her mother's plot ; and it was 
natural that she should rejoice over the chance of her 
husband's conversion. That conversion was now to be 
confirmed by a miracle that no one, I trust, would choose 
to disbelieve. Valerian, full of his new-found faith, clad 
in the robe of his baptism, is checked on the entrance to 
Caecilia' s room by a light that streamed under the curtain 
that cut off her own chamber. He looked through in 
amazement, and saw his v/ife kneeling in prayer, and at her 
side an angel, radiant and glorious. He went and knelt 
beside his wife and 

" This Aungel hadde of roses and of lilie 
Corounes tuo, the which he bar in honde. 
And first to Cecihe, as I understonde, 
He gyf that oon, and after gan he take 
That other to Valerian her make. 

• With body clene, and with unwemmed thought 
Kepeth ay well these corounes,' quoth he. 

• Fro paradys to you I have them brought, 
Ne never moo he schul they roten be, 

Ne lesse her soote savour, trusteth me, 
Ne never wight schal seen hem with his ye. 
But he be chast, and hate vilonye. 

And thou. Valerian, for thou so soone 
Assentedist to good counseil, also 
Say what the list, and thou schalt have thy boone.' 
' I have a brother,' quod Valerian tho 

• That in this world I love no man so, 

I pray you that my brother may have grace 
To knowe the truthe, as I doo in this place.' -' 

Valerian's brother Tibertius is converted, and subse- 
quently both the brothers are led out to execution, where 
their constancy and courage convert Maximus, the officer 
who conducted the martyrdom, and he courted and 
received death on the same day at the same spot. 



TWO ROMAN MARTYRS 223 

No doubt the authorities believed and hoped that this 
wholesale slaughter would terrify Caecilia into abandoning 
her faith. The girl-bride, however, remained steadfast, 
and resisted all efforts to make her submit to the Imperial 
decrees, and sacrifice to Caesar. Her attitude angered the 
Emperor so much, or someone — very likely a woman — 
in his entourage that it was determined to murder Caecilia 
as well. Not unnaturally it was desired to do this quietly ; 
so the judge, one Almachius, gave orders that she should 
be shut up in the caldarium of her own palace, and 
suffocated to death. He thought, of course, that the 
prospect of this slow and undignified death would rouse 
her patrician blood, and that the girl would open her 
veins, and go to the shades in the approved Roman 
fashion. 

His orders were carried out. Caecilia was forced into the 
warm-bath chamber, and the pipes that led to it were 
heated. The chamber remained shut for twenty-four 
hours, and then they opened it to take out her body. 

** The longe night, and eek a day also, 
For al the fyr, and eek the bathes hete, 
Sche sat al cold, and felte of it no woo, 
Hit naade hir not oon drope for to swete. 
But in that bathe hir life sche moste lete ; 
For he Almachius, with ful wikke entente 
To sleen hir in the bath his sondes sente." 

The end of her agony approached. The lictors descended 
into the room and bade the girl kneel. This she did 
gladly, putting her hair back from her neck, and waiting 
for the stroke. The man was either unused to the ghastly 
business, or was overcome by the heat of the room, and 
the calm, proud bearing of the girl. He hit at her wildly 
once, twice — each time the axe went home, but the young 
head remained unsevered ; he gathered himself up for the 
last stroke (the law allowed only three) and again bungled 



224 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE 

his aim. The man rushed out of the bathroom, leaving 
CaeciHa ahve, but bleeding slowly to death. For three 
days she remained thus : her friends and relations, and the 
whole Christian community that could come, streamed 
past her room, beseeching her blessing. On the third 
day Urban,^ leaving his hiding-place in the Catacombs, 
came to say farewell to his daughter in the faith, and on 
the evening of that day Caecilia died. 



'' Saynt Urban, with his dekenes prively 
The body fette, and buried it by nighte 
Among his other seyntes honestely. 
Hir hous the chirch of seynt Cecily yit highte ; 
Seynt Urban halwed it, as he wel mighte ; 
In wich into this day in noble wyse 
Men doon to Crist and to his seint servise." 



Caecilia lay amid " the other saints " until 821, when 
Pope Paschal I. found her body near the crypts where 
the popes were buried. Her body was still fresh and un- 
corrupt, clad in rich garments, heavy with gold and 
embroidery, with the linen cloths, blood-stained, of her 
martyrdom, lying at her feet, in a great coffin of carved 
cypress wood. Paschal, as he himself says, lined the 
coffin anew with silk, placed it in a sarcophagus of white 
marble, and had it put under the High Altar of S. Caecilia 
in Trestevere, the house of her death. Paschal's story of 
his discovery and his action was confirmed in a striking 
manner in 1599, when the marble sarcophagus was opened 
by Cardinal Sfondrati, and disclosed the coffin of cypress. 
There Csecilia's body, still uncorrupt, was seen to be lying 
in the attitude commemorated by the statue by Madema, 
which now stands before her grave. Pope Clement VHI. 
had careful examination made of the holy relics by Bar- 
onius and Bosio, and their reports are still extant. The 

* Some traditions say that it was Pope Urban who paid this visit. 



TWO ROMAN MARTYRS 225 

body was exposed for veneration during the space of 
four or five weeks, and then replaced beneath the High 
Altar. 

I have no explanation to offer as to the preservation of 
Caecilia's body : it is not impossible, though unlikely, that 
it was embalmed in the first instance ; but even so, it is 
an astonishing fact that it should have survived its two 
exposures to the air, and even more surprising that the 
clothes should not have fallen to pieces. 

The house of Caecilia is underground, and there we first 
went, to pray in the original church which Pope Urban 
hallowed in 230. The actual chapel of S. Caecilia and her 
coevals. Valerian, Tibertius and Maximus, has been 
gorgeously restored by Cardinal Rampolla in a really 
successful if rather over-ornate style. There is also 
down here a Christian museum of no great interest, 
and there are other relics, notably an altar of Minerva, 
said to be of Republican times ; it is curious that the 
only two pagan goddesses here represented should be 
the maiden Athene, and, on a sarcophagus in the museum, 
Diana. 

The upper church is really the more beautiful and fuller 
of interest. It is true the first appearance of the church, 
whose columns have been bricked up by some barbarian, 
is uninviting ; but there are many other things of great 
beauty. There is an exquisite tomb, clean in feeling and 
serene in execution, by Mino da Fiesole, and the same 
master is represented by a charming Madonna and Child. 
The mosaics, of the early ninth century, are not remark- 
able for their gracefulness, but they have considerable 
strength and candour of colour. There is about the church 
something of the atmosphere of a house, which is intensified 
when one steps into the chapel which was built on the site 
of the caldarium, and whose altar formed the stone of 
execution. 



226 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE 

I like to thinkof these two saints, Lawrence and Cae cilia, 
together. They belong to the same Rome, and to the 
same order of civilization — although Lawrence was plebeian 
and Caecilia an aristocrat. It is a pity that their characters 
should have been so merged in their miracles by the later 
compilers of the Acts of the Martyrs. They are both of 
them usual enough people — though Lawrence, I am afraid, 
is not often a Christian nowadays, and Caecilia has her 
namesake's faults without her namesake's beautiful, 
childlike tact and wonderful spirit of endurance. I find 
it a little harder to recover Caecilia than Lawrence. He, 
with his downright, abrupt manners, his jolly, country 
sense of fun, his pleasure in ** pulling the leg " of the mean 
judge, Decius, is a character we all know and like — unless 
we are too dignified to like him. But Caecilia is rather less 
human. I suppose religious girls of fifteen — or boys, for 
that matter — are apt to be a little inhuman ; she had been 
brought up to so ascetic and one-sided a view of the 
Christian life that she must have had an astonishing 
sweetness and force of character to bring her husband and 
his brother to see her point of view, and go to death for it. 
In some ways she reminds me of S. Catherine of Siena, 
and again, just a little, of S. Francis : she is one of those 
beings whos© characters are so sunny, so full of the joy of 
life, so untainted with the slightest touch of selfishness, 
that men will go anywhere and do anything for her. Ah ! 
she is surely most like Joan of Arc — the peasant and the 
patrician must be close friends now ; and I rather believe 
it must have been Caecilia, and not Catherine, who appeared 
to Joan in the fields. And her sweetness of disposition, 
her astonishing, '* charming" power, has made the Christian 
world give her the patronage of music, the art which is 
least reasonable — least explicable — the art which more 
than any other is wrought of pure and unalloyed beauty. 
" Unconfessed, she is of all the mythic saints for ever the 
greatest ; and the child in the nurse's arms, and every 



TWO ROMAN MARTYRS 227 

tender and gentle spirit which resolves to purify in itself, 
— as the eye for seeing, so the ear for hearing — may still, 
whether behind the Temple veil, or at the fireside, and by 
the wayside, hear Caecilia sing. . . ." ^ 

^ Ruskin, op. ciU 



CHAPTER XII 

A SORCERER AND A SAINT 

ON a particularly fine afternoon in May, the year of 
Our Lord fifty-five, there was a great concourse of 
people in the Forum. The Vestal Virgins were there, 
prominent in their white robes and with their filleted 
brows ; the senators and equites were ranged on either 
side of the Imperial throne, and all around were the 
people, expectant, eager, half afraid and half amused. 
In a specially erected box, leaning on the marble balcony, 
his face already beginning to show the lines of excess and 
glutted lust, yet with something of beauty in the eager lines 
of the mouth and the curious, restless glance of his eye, 
sat the Lord Nero Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, 
with his wife Octavia and his mother Agrippina. Now 
and again he would raise to his eye the emerald, through 
which he was to gaze on so much spilt blood, and so many 
dishonoured bodies ; his arms were crossed on the balcony ; 
on his forefinger there glittered a huge amethyst, and on 
the thumb of his left hand was a ring set with a large 
black pearl. Suddenly he gives a signal, at the request 
of a slim, keen-looking Jew who is standing at the back 
of the box. Before the Imperial throne steps a man of 
handsome presence ; he has a hawk-like nose, a grave 
and reverend beard, a mouth whose lines are the least bit 
flabby and imcertain, and an eye of singular, transparent 
blue, an eye that seems glazed and fixed, an eye that would 
appear to tell everything, and yet, when you look into its 
depths, baffles and deceives the watcher. The man 

228 



A SORCERER AND A SAINT 229 

approaches nearer to the throne and bows low : in his 
hand is a long black staff, the end of which is shaped like 
the claw of a phoenix — the talons are of matrix of topaz 
and in the claw is set a large and splendid opal. The man, 
after he has saluted the Emperor, stands for a few minutes, 
leaning on his staff, which he holds curiously between 
the palms of his hands, which are placed just below the 
phoenix's claw ; he gazes intently on the opal, and then 
lifts up his head, and turns ceremonially, always holding 
the staff, to north, and south, and east, and west. Having 
completed the circuit he begins to walk, rather hesitatingly, 
like a man in a dream ; his eyes, blue and china-like, are 
apparently fixed on the Capitol. Before he has walked 
twenty yards the staff in his hands is suddenly agitated, 
and the magician stands still, and again faces the Imperial 
throne. He draws himself to his full height — ^he is about 
five feet eleven — and speaks : 

" The signs, my Lord, are auspicious. By the help of 
heaven and by this my art I, Simon Magus, will now 
ascend before you, O Princeliness, and before the assem- 
bled Senate and people of great Rome. I will ascend 
through the air up to the height of the Capitol, then 
turn round and come back to this spot where I will leave 
my staff. So shall you, O great Lord and all the people of 
Rome know that the Jew Christus, whom some Hebrews 
and alas ! some Romans are fools enough to worship, was 
no god ; but a magician no mightier nor stronger than 
am I." 

Simon Magus then took his staff and, munnuring a 
cabalistic word, bade it stand upright and await his 
return : and the staff stood on the stone pavement, 
with its huge opal changing from colour to colour in the 
rays of the sun. Then the sorcerer took off the great green 
chlamys that flowed down to his heels, and stood before 
tlie people in a plain white tunic that came well below 
his knees ; on his feet he had black sandals, and at the 



230 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE 

heel of each sandal a small silver wing, like the wings of 
Hermes, the guide of souls. Then he stretched out his 
arms in the form of a cross, and with his eyes turned 
towards heaven began the incantation. 

All the people were following his proceedings with 
breathless interest. Over his marble balustrade the 
Emperor was leaning out, flushed with excitement ; by 
his side was the young Octavia, her weak little mouth 
half open in pleased anticipation of this new way of 
passing her empty day ; there was Seneca too, already 
preparing some moral apophthegm on ambition and 
flight, and the rest of the court as genuinely roused as 
Roman nobles were capable of being. Nor were the 
people less excited, and the whole Forum was heavy with 
that wonderful hush that sometimes possesses a large 
crowd ; no one was speaking, no one moving, and all 
eyes were directed at Simon Magus, who still stood by his 
ebony staff, with his arms stretched out to the north 
and south. There was one little group which, even in 
that expectant crowd, was noticeably more moved than 
the rest : they were looking at Simon Magus, but looking 
at him not so much in expectation as with horror. They 
were standing outside the Temple of Venus and Apollo, and 
they seemed to have some greater purpose than the 
curiosity that inspired the rest of the multitude. In the 
middle of them was a stout, gnarled old man, with grizzled 
hair and beard, and that look in his eyes that tells of the 
water and of fishing. His great hands, with their forceful, 
business-like thumbs, were clutching and unclutching as he 
stood, apparently rapt in some deep mental agony. The 
rest of the little company kept looking at him, whenever 
they could tear their gaze away from the sinister figure 
with its white robe and black sandals that was still 
standing by the Staff of the Phcenix. 

Suddenly a low cry swayed the crowd. Simon Magus 
was rising. Steadily he went up, keeping his body rigid. 



A SORCERER AND A SAINT 231 

but with ever so slight a movement of the feet, and with 
his hands drooping from the wrist instead of straight 
out. Right up he rose, and then turned — or rather was 
turned in the air — and began to float towards the Capitol. 
Slowly he approached the northern summit, rising high 
above the Arx and the Temple of Juno, the Warner, 
and then above the shrine of the ancient Queen of Heaven 
— where now stands the Church of Ara Coeli — he stayed 
for a moment, hovering, like a gull, on his outstretched 
arms. 

Everyone was following the flight with eager and 
amazed eyes : but tears, of anger and disappointment, 
were in the eyes of many of the group in front of the 
Temple of Venus and Apollo. They turned, anxiously, 
beseechingly, to the figure in their midst. Simon Peter, 
for it was the bishop of the little Christian community, 
was now far more at his ease. He no longer looked 
disturbed; his eyes had a glad, confident certainty in them : 
at the moment when the magician slowly began to float 
away from Juno Moneta, Simon Peter fell on his knees 
and cried out : " Anathema, anathema sit. Maranatha. 
Domine, extrude brachiam pot est at is tuae." Then turn- 
ing and looking up at the sorcerer, who still hung in the 
air, the Apostle slowly and deliberately made the Sign 
of the Cross towards the figure who was parodying, by 
the aid of hell, the Ascension of the Lord. As he com- 
pleted the sacred symbol Simon Magus, without a cry, 
fell sheer down, at first as a bird drops to her nest, and 
then crumpled, tossing, a mere flying whirl of distracted 
limbs : as his rigidity was relaxed, as his support was 
removed — who can say what hosts of hell were keeping 
him up ? — his body was thrown away from the Capitol, 
over towards the Imperial throne, where it fell down and 
lay, broken, smashed, unrecognizable, at the base of 
the Emperor's balcony, and the blood, which stained the 
white robe and was spattered on the black sandals with 



232 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE 

their silver wings, splashed up over the edge of the balcony 
and fell on the hands of Nero. At the same moment with 
a startling clang the Staff of the Phoenix, which had re- 
mained upright on the pavement, fell : the claw relaxed, 
and the great opal danced away, ghttering, flashing in the 
rays of the sun. 

The stone on which S. Peter knelt, on that day when 
he saw the devils holding up his old opponent, and 
prayed, in the power of the keys, to the Master who had 
given him that sacred charge, is preserved in the Church 
of Santa Francesca Romana — once the Temple of Venus 
and Apollo, afterwards S. Maria Nuova — taking the 
place of S. Maria Antica, which lay beneath the ruins of 
the Palatine until eleven years ago — and later still called 
after that sweetest of Roman saints, the noble mother, 
Francesca di Ponziano, who was buried here in 1440, 
and canonized in 1608. 

It is strange that the shrine of so gentle a saint should 
be connected with so terrible an incident as the death of 
Simon Magus. There are people who find the story of the 
destruction of the sorcerer too savage for their taste ; 
they will have it that such a punishment is alien to the 
spirit of Christianity, and that the story which is found, 
without the name of the magician, in Suetonius and Dio 
Chrysostom, is far too horrible to be true. I cannot in the 
least understand how Christians have come to acquire 
this exaggerated sense of the value of life. The whole of 
the argument against the righteousness of such punish- 
ments as the wiping out of the Canaanitish tribes, the 
death of Ananias and Sapphira, and this tragedy of 
Simon Magus rests on a single assumption — namely, that 
death is always the worst thing that can happen to a man. 
This is quite un-Christian : according to the Christian 
view of life any mortal sin is worse than death, and who 
are we, who daily condemn men to death through our 



A SORCERER AND A SAINT 233 

methods of justice, through our carelessness of trade 
conditions, through our international quarrels, through 
our system of medicine, through our callous ignorance 
about food and drink — to object to death as a Divine 
punishment on sinners whose subsequent fates are in the 
providence of the Eternal ? If Simon had lived — but 
why speculate ? Most of us know many Simons who in 
God's stern justice have been allowed to live on, and the 
earth is sick and sorry with the stink of their arts and 
trickeries. We must clear our minds of that desperate 
piece of humbug that this mortal life is the one thing 
which we must not be severed from — so strange is man in 
refusing a cheerful welcome to the one guest whom he can 
neither invite nor refuse. For suicide is not death : it is 
the last cowardly resort of the man who is afraid of dying. 
Just as the drunkard will, to forget the remorse of his 
drunkenness, get drunk again, so the suicide, in fear of 
dying, will pursue death, and finding, as he thinks, the 
great deliverer, with his immortal anodyne, wakes only to 
discover that he is gazing, with how great a terror, into the 
terrible eyes of the New Life, whose issue no man can tell. 
Ther<-; is nothing un~Christian about the end of Simon 
Maguo : but we love to dwell more on the life of such a 
woman as Frances of Rome. Too often, in the lives of the 
later saints, there are characteristics which seem definitely 
inhuman and unpleasant ; not seldom, as in the life of 
Aloysius, a youth " whose modesty was so rancid that 
he would not look on his mother," there are elements 
absolutely unclean and revolting — but with S. Francesca, 
as with her namesake S. Francis ^ — we feel immediately at 

1 What would the Poverello have done with Aloysius or 
Berehmanns ? This latter, after his death, was once asked by a 
devotee whether the crude picture she had of him was like — the 
answer vouchsafed was the transformation of the picture into a 
very beautiful portrait which those who will may see in the 
Church of S. Maria in Campo Marcio. 



234 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE 

home. Hers was, in spite (or because) of its astound- 
ing mixture of the naively supernatural (she saw her 
guardian angel perpetually for thirty years), an astonish- 
ingly simple, kindly and human faith. ^ 

The daughter of noble parents, she married a noble, and 
was a devoted wife and mother ; she spent much time and 
money in good works, was a woman of exceptional courage 
and capacity in emergencies. Her husband was on the 
Papal side in the war between Naples and Rome. Ladislas 
of Naples left as Governor of the City Count Pietro Troja. 
Skirmishing between the two parties was not infrequent, 
and in one bout, although Troja had the worst of it, 
Lorenzo Ponziano was wounded and had to take refuge 
in his palace in Trastevere — which is now a house for 

1 In 141 2 Francesca Ponziano lost her son Evangelista Ponziano 
(he is buried in S. CaeciHa, one of his mother's favourite churches). 
A year after his death Francesca had a vision. Her son appeared 
to her, and told her that he was in bliss with the angels ; with him 
was a companion, like, yet more beautiful. This was the angel 
whom, Evangelista said, God had chosen to be her companion. 
" Night and day by your side he will assist you in all your ways.'- 
Then the vision of her son departed, but the angel guardian 
remained with her, visible to her alone, until the day of her death. 
Francesca described her heavenly companion to her confessor. 
" His brow is always serene, his glances kindle in the soul the flame 
of ardent devotion. When I look upon him, I understand the glory 
of the angelic nature and the degraded condition of our own. He 
wears a long shining robe, and over it a tunic, either as white as 
the lilies of the field, or the colour of a red rose, or of the hue of 
the sky when it is intensely blue. When he walks by my side 
his feet are never soiled by the mud of the street or by the dust of 
the road. The rays of light which dart from his brow send the 
demons away, howling." I leave to others to discuss how far such 
a vision as this was objective ; but in any discussion it should be 
remembered that Francesca was not a nun, but a wife and a mother, 
given to good works, who did not retire from the world until her 
husband's death, twenty-four years after the first appearance of her 
angel. I don't think she would have had much patience with the 
modem selfishness, which finds holy matrimony incompatible with 
a deep religious vocation. 



A SORCERER AND A SAINT 235 

retreatants. Pietro Troja, probably despairing of making 
a successful attack in the huddled quarters of the poorest 
and most Papal part of Rome, demanded that Francesca 
should hand over her child as a hostage for her husband's 
good behaviour, and, in the event of refusal, threatened 
dire reprisals that Francesca apparently thought he might 
well succeed in carrying out. The mother, in the first 
agony of danger for her child — Gian Battista, who was 
only eight years old — fled with him, to try whether she 
could not hide him somewhere in security. On her way 
she met her confessor. He was probably a man who knew 
that Troja was more a blusterer than a man of action, 
and he bade the mother deliver her child to the Count 
(who was at the Capitol) and go herself to the Church 
of Ara Coeli. Francesca obeyed. The populace, fully 
persuaded that Troja was a devil, tried to prevent her ; 
but she took her son to the Governor, and then fled to 
Ara Coeli, and prayed before the picture of Our Lady. 

Troja, pleased at the soldierly aspect of the little boy, 
and put in a good humour at having brought to his feet 
one of the noblest and most pious and best loved women 
in Rome, asks Gian Battista if he can ride. *' But yes." 
A horse is brought and the boy placed upon the saddle 
in front of an officer. *' Would you hke to go off with this 
officer, and have a good ride ? " " Oh yes," said the 
boy, *' but — but I would like mother to come too." 
Troja, however, felt bound to stick to his word, and 
ordered the officer to ride off with the lad, and keep him 
safely until further orders. In a moment the oflicer 
gave his horse a slight touch with the whip, and — the 
animal refused to move. Spur and whip were plied with 
vigour ; but with the same result. Another horse was 
brought, and the same scene repeated. There was not a 
horse near — they tried four — that would sever Francesca 
the Beloved from her son. Troja, angry and puzzled, but 
rather impressed, gave orders that Gian Battista should 



236 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE 

be given back to his mother, who hastened from Ara 
Coeh and took the boy back to the sickbed of her husband. 

It was this woman whom the Romans of the fifteenth 
century chose for their saint ; she was invoked long before 
official sanction was given to her worship in 1608, and 
to this day, on her feast, the room in the Convent of Tor 
di Specchi is visited by crowds of people.^ 

*' Convent " is not perhaps too accurate a word for the 
abode of the good ladies who follow the example and pre- 
cept of S. Frances. In nothing, perhaps, is her sense and 
piety better shown than in the religious order she founded. 
She must have noticed the ill effects that sprang from so 
many orders, nominally poor, living in great luxury and 
riches ; she must have lamented the decline of the Fran- 
ciscan and Dominican religions, and of that other order 
which the great Teresa of Jesus was to reform in Spain. 
S. Frances anticipated and exceeded the wisdom of Igna- 
tius and of Philip Neri when she founded in 1433 the 
Tor di Specchi for women. These Oblates, bound by no 
vows, live retired from the world in poverty, in obedience 
and self-sacrifice ; each retains her private property, but 
it is an accepted rule that she devotes the minimum of it 
to her personal needs, while the rest is spent in good works. 
The result is that here you have an order whose voluntary 

1 The old Ponziano palace, now Casa degli Esercizii Pii, is also 
visited on 9th March. 

" On the day of the festival its rooms are thrown open, every 
memorial of the gentle saint is exhibited, Ughts bum on numerous 
altars, flowers deck the passages, leaves are strewn in the chapel, 
on the stairs, in the entrance court ; gay carpets, figured tapestry, 
and crimson silks hang over the doorways, and crowds of people 
go in and out, and kneel before the relics or the pictures of the 
dear Saint of Rome. It is a touching festival, which carries back 
the mind to the day when the young bride of Lorenzo Ponziano 
entered these walls for the first time, in all the sacred beauty of 
holiness and youth." — Lady G. Fullerton, " Life of St Frances 
of Rome." 



A SORCERER AND A SAINT 237 

obedience and poverty and service is the result, not of a 
single moment of complete renunciation, but of a perpetual 
effort, a perpetually renewed series of acts of self -dedication. 
God forbid that I should say anything in depreciation of 
the great rule of S. Benedict, or of the rule of the Trappists, 
or of the Discalced Carmelites. But in this life of oblation 
you have, I think, a rule, which, in its freedom from regula- 
tion, achieves a greater ideal than the life of abnegation, 
which may be the work of haste or of ignorance, and after- 
wards be bitterly repented of. The old rules are no doubt 
fitter for certain characters, for those whom we are now 
accustomed to think of as '* saints " ; but for men and 
women who desire to serve God perfectly in religion it 
seems to me that it is difficult to choose a more excellent 
way than that selected by S. Frances for her friends and 
for herself. For to the Tor di Specchi Francesca Ponziano 
came, when she was left a widow, and for the last four 
years of her life she went about doing good, nursing the 
sick and visiting the poor. She had, however, none of 
that sickly and disgusting attitude towards the married 
life which we find praised in certain neo-Catholic books 
written by decadent Ultramontanes ; she had not for- 
gotten her husband and the joys of married life and the 
sweet solace of children. So when her time came to die, 
it is easy to imagine how pleased she must have been at 
being ordered by her confessor (who met her in the street, 
while she was ill) to go to the palace of her married life. 
So she returned to the house where she had lived with 
Lorenzo, and to the bridal chamber whither he had led 
her as a girl, and there, on 9th March 1440, she " went 
home.'' Her angel, still with her, for once left her side 
and stood before her, beckoning Francesca to follow : 
and murmuring to the watchers, " Love one another 
and be faithful unto death," Francesca went after the 
spirit who had for so long time been her companion 
and friend. 



238 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE 

Wlien we went to visit the Church of S. Francesca and 
kneel at her shrine, one of the brothers connected with it, 
an Ohvetan Benedictine (he was a young Frenchman) 
took us down behind the High Altar and withdrew the 
shutter which covers the glass casket in which the earthly 
remains of S. Frances rest. She had not that singular 
charisma which some saints have had — notably S. Csecilia 
and our own S. Oswald — and we saw only a skeleton 
clothed in the religious garb. I can find nothing but 
affection and beauty in such a treatment of the dear dead : 
it is good to remember the bare facts of death and of 
mortality in the presence of the remains of one who was, 
in her life, so fully and wonderfully cognizant of the things 
of the spirit : for there, at her shrine, it was not difficult to 
reahze how little a thing death is. He could spoil, and 
has spoiled, the fair form of Lorenzo's bride ; but the 
memory of her is fragrant still in the hearts of the Roman 
people, and her deeds have lived after her, while she her- 
self, reunited to Lorenzo and Agnese and Evangelista and 
her other relations and friends, still prays for the dear city 
of Rome and her own district of Trastevere. 

Apart from the memory of S. Frances and its connexion 
with the death of Simon Magus, ^ the church has little of 
interest. Architecturally it can boast one of the finest 
campanili in Rome. There is a statue group of S. 
Francesca and her angel by Bernini, which is rather more 
subdued than some of the sculptor's work, but quite 
uninspired by any understanding of the saint. 

There is a mosaic in the tribune — the only part of the 
old church which survived the fire of 12 16 — that has a good 
colour scheme but is poor in design and weak in its figures : 
it probably belongs to the twelfth century and represents 

1 Perhaps I ought to say that there is no sort of likeUhood that 
the stone, said to be impressed by S. Peter's knee, is anything but 
unauthentic. I expect it was originally placed in S. Maria Nuova 
as a memorial of the incident. 



A SORCERER AND A SAINT 239 

Madonna enthroned with SS. Peter, Andrew, James and 
John. 

When you have crossed the Ponte Cestio you are in a 
different Rome : here under the protection of Our Lady 
across the Tiber hve those who claim to be the hneal 
descendants of the old Romans ; people who boast of 
being Trasteverini and who speak with pity and con- 
tempt of those others who do not enjoy the same privilege. 
As to how far their claim is true I must leave archae- 
ologists to determine ; what is certain is that this district 
was annexed by Augustus and called Regio Transtiberina ; 
that in spite of the villas which lined the banks of the 
river, the region was chiefly inhabited by poor people — 
and indeed was not unlike what Chelsea had been before 
the days of modern improvements. Trastevere, however, 
was not only a poor quarter : it was a foreigners' quarter. 
It was in Trastevere that the Jews lived until Paul IV. 
in 1556 assigned to them the Ghetto near Santa Maria di 
Campitelli, and hard by Sant' Angelo in Pescheria, where 
the sermons, immortalized by Robert Browning, were 
preached to the obstinacy of the circumcision. As Tras- 
tevere was the Jews' quarters in Imperial times it is a 
probable tradition which states that S. Peter came here 
first on his arrival in Rome, and that Trastevere heard the 
Gospel before the Forum, the Palatine or the Vatican. 
And to-day, if you want to see beautiful men and women, 
people whose bearing and features answer a little to one's 
expectations of the Romans of Republican days, it is to 
Trastevere you must go. There are antiquarians who say 
these are no Romans, that the ancient stock is hopelessly 
mingled with Goth and Greek and Jew, and they may be 
right ; but here in the streets of Trastevere you may see 
a man who will not unnobly recall the figure of a Cincin- 
natus or an Antony, and a woman who will bring back 
recollections of Comeha or Volumnia. 



240 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE 

If the ancient pagan associations of Trastevere are doubt- 
ful, there is no question about the glory which this part of 
the city has in the eyes of Christians. Caecilia and her 
church we had already visited ; but the Church of Our 
Lady we left till near the end of our visit, and were glad 
we did so. For dignity of effect, in spite of the restorer's 
efforts, the church is notable even in this city of notable 
basihcas. And apart from the beauty of this temple, 
it has a history which in length and interest can vie 
with that of the five great churches. Whether this or 
S. Maria Maggiore is actually the first Christian church 
named after Our Lady is an unsettled question. I like 
to think myself that it was here, among her own people, the 
Jews, that Mary first obtained honour ; and if the tradi- 
tion that there was a Christian meeting-house here in the 
time of Pope Calixtus I. is true, the church is older than 
that gorgeous building which shelters the relics of the 
holy manger.-^ It seems probable that here, where the 
Christian community was almost entirely Jewish, the 
thoughts of the church, when the question was discussed 
whose protection the building should be put under, 
should turn to the Jewish maid whose full beauty and 
power were then beginning to dawn upon the Catholic 
world. Here, amid people who were hers in race, in 
poverty, in shame, Mary began to receive that honour 
which has since been so marvellously increased; here, away 
from the pride of Rome, the haughtiness of the Caesars, 
and the power of the Capitol, may have been sung for the 
first time, in honour of Our Lady, that old song of the 
Jewish Church, " Lord, I am not high-minded : I have no 

1 The story is that the tavern-keepers disputed with the Chris- 
tian community the ownership of a certain building : but the 
question came before Alexander Severus, who decided in favour 
of the Christians on the ground that any worship of God should 
be given the precedence over revelry and drunkenness. Perhaps 
a converted popinarius was the cause of the trouble. 



A SORCERER AND A SAINT 241 

proud looks. I do not exercise myself in great matters ; 
which are too high for me. But I refrain my soul, and 
keep it low, like as a child that is weaned from his mother : 
yea, my soul is even as a weaned child. O Israel, trust in 
the Lord : from this time forth for evermore." And Israel, 
who had seen the coming of the Messiah, showed their 
trust in erecting to God the temple now known as S. 
Maria in Trastevere. 

The present building was erected by Innocent II. in 
1 140, and consecrated by Innocent III. in 1198. The 
most noticeable characteristic of this church is the con- 
trast, greater than usual, between the nave and the choir. 
The mosaics of the choir may not be more beautiful, but 
they appear to be more gorgeous than most of those 
decorative wonders that make the Roman churches 
glow and sing with colour ; they represent scenes 
familiar to those who have looked at other mosaics ; 
here you have again the procession of sheep towards 
the Lamb of God, and here is Madonna, in a garb 
heaA^ with jewels, rich with embroidery, '* her clothing 
of wrought gold," seated beside her Son and Saviour. He 
holds a book with the words, '' Veni electa mea et ponam 
te in thronum meum," while in the scroll which Madonna 
holds are the words from Solomon's Song : " Laeva 
eius sub capite meo, et dextera illius amplexabitur me." 

Once again I am reminded of that amazing ode in which 
one of the greatest of English Catholic poets sang the 
Triumph of Mary : 



See in highest heaven pavilioned 

Now the maiden Heaven rest. 
The many-breasted sky out-milHoned 

By the splendours of her vest. 
Lo, the Ark this holy tide is. 

The un-handmade Temple's guest, 
And the dark Egyptian bride is 

Whitely to the spouse -heart prest ! 



242 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE 

He the Anteros and Eros, 

Nail me to Thee, sweetest Cross ! 

He is fast to me, Ischyros, 
Agios Aihanaios ! 

Who will give them me for brother, 

Counted of my family, 
Sucking the sweet breasts of my Mother ? 

I His Flesh, and mine is He ; 
To my Bread myself the Bread is. 

And my Wine doth drink me : see. 
His left hand beneath my head is, 
His right hand embraceth me ! 
Sweetest Anteros and Eros, 

Lo, her arms He leans across ; 
Dead that we die not, stooped to rear us, 
Thanatos Athanatos. 

Who is She, in candid vesture, 

Rushing up from out the brine ? 
Treading with resilient gesture 

Air, and with that Cup divine ? 
She in us, and we in her are, 

Beating Godward : all that pine, 
Lo, a wonder and a terror ! 

The Sun hath blushed the Sea to wine ! 
He the Anteros and Eros, 

She the Bride and Spirit ; for 
Now the days of promise near us 
And the Sea shall be no more." 

This is the enthronement of woman, the victory of love, 
the coronation of self-sacrifice, the definite glory of what 
has been the contemned of the world — here is the trans- 
valuation of all values which the ragged-minded prophet 
of Germany sought for in vain. 

And on what a scene those gorgeous mosaics look ! 
The huge nave with its twenty-two columns, massive, 
irregular, is typical of that Judaism, stern, grand and 
unyielding, which was destined to be the path to Christian- 
ity. There is no decided note of colour, in spite of the 



A SORCERER AND A SAINT 243 

splendid entablature above the columns, until you look 
down and see the pavement, or up to the ceiling, with its 
Domenichino's Assumption, and its gold and blue decora- 
tion. It is in this church that one can reahze more than 
in any other the change, the growth, the inevitable 
change and the necessary growth that has passed over 
Catholicism. One may regret that it is no longer possible to 
stand in the little Cahxtine building that was erected on the 
site of the holy oil-spring, where had been a hospital for 
sailors ; one may regret and remember the fifth-century 
building which once stood where is now the Church of the 
Innocents — but as one watches the crowds that flock to 
the present shrine it is not possible to avoid seeing that 
here those people are at home, that here, just as in the past, 
they can find Mary and Jesus, that this is right for them 
as the older buildings for people of older days : and in this 
spirit it is possible to meet the chance of future changes 
not merely with equanimity but with gladness. A modern 
Jesuit writes sadly of Trastevere : " Unfortimately various 
Protestant sects and Socialist clubs are doing their 
utmost to sap the faith of this simple people, and much 
harm is being done " — I don't believe it, or if it is so, the 
fault is with the Church. No harm, but good should come 
of opposition and criticism and attack. By them the 
Christian Church is made to realize her position, to revise 
her standards, to furbish her arms, to look to her battle- 
ments. Not easily is Mary ousted from the hearts of her 
children ; and it would need a wilderness of sects and clubs 
to break the charm of the old basilica — but if the people 
are careless and faithless, if the Christian plebs, these here 
who boast themselves Trojans, have been immoral and 
shiftless ; if they forget Caeciha who died for them, and 
Francesca who laboured for them, then it may well be 
that their faith is in danger. Nothing is more damnably 
untrue than the lie that all heretics are evil-livers ; nothing 
is more certainly true than the truth that all evil-livers 



244 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE 

are on the verge of heresy. One has heard it said that 
an immoral CathoHc is better than a heretic ; the adage 
would be true if only we could forget that mortal sin cuts 
a man off from God entirely ; and who would argue that 
a man who sees God faultily, through an imperfect glass, 
is worse off than he from whom the Divine vision is hid 
altogether, who has no glimpse at all of the glory that 
shines from the throne of the Eternal ? 



CHAPTER XIII 

RAPHAEL AND PINTURICCHIO 

OF all the Pagan stories that Christianity adopted, the 
one most easily borrowed, the one that needed least 
adaptation, was the tale of Cupid and Psyche. The con- 
crete genius of Apuleius left the tale as beautiful, as 
spiritual as he found it ; and it was left for Christian 
painters to insinuate that strange cry of the flesh 
distinct from the spirit which is the subtlest snare 
of the devil. Many quite good people go wrong on the 
question of the body. You meet Christians who argue 
whole-heartedly against the nude in art, and the Vatican 
galleries, with their rows of fig-leaves, testify that where 
lust reigned prudery reigned also. Of course the question 
of the nude in art is too big to be argued here : but there 
are two things which need saying before I go on to the 
Psyche frescoes in the Farnesina Palace. First we have 
this truth : that the human body is an entirely beautiful 
and holy thing, and that any representation of it is more 
beautiful where the body is undraped than where it is 
clothed ; then we must admit that the devil as usual has 
soiled and spoiled this as he soils and spoils other of 
God's beautiful things, and that the vessel of honour, the 
Temple of the Holy Ghost, may become the home of 
demons, of lust and of cruelty. That this can be any 
reason for condemning the nude in art is perhaps the 
oddest position ever taken by thinking man : it is surely 
obvious that nothing would be more difficult than to make 
a salacious picture out of purely nude figures — you might 
have pictures directly indecent, but scarcely an art that 

245 



246 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE 

has, for instance, the various hibricity of FeHcien Rops. 
The nude is in itself a pure thing. Then there comes the 
more difficult problem as to how far a merely sensuous 
picture is tolerable ; on this I have touched in writing 
about Correggio — and I feel that in any true, Platonic state 
art such as his in the mythological pictures, and art such 
as glows from many of Rubens' nudes, would be treated 
as quite illegitimate. For what do these painters do ? 
They accomplish the great severance — the monstrous 
divorce — they divide body from soul. So long as a 
picture of the nude conveys not only the body, but the 
fact that it is the body of a human being, the artist cannot 
go wrong. Remember, I am not here speaking of artistic 
methods, or of the artist's motive ; Rembrandt in his 
nudes never achieves salaciousness — least of all in his few 
indecent pictures — because Rembrandt the man was 
incapable of painting mere flesh. I do not say that 
Rembrandt, when he painted, for instance, the " Woman 
bathing," in the National Gallery, tried to do anything 
but be truthful ; but for Rembrandt the truth he saw 
included the fact that it was a woman bathing and not 
merely an effect of light and air on human flesh, on 
the linen smock and the woman's bowed, engaged head. 
For painters like Rubens, at moments, like Ingres, like 
Sargent, the thing to be painted is really the effect of 
hght on certain materials — they have no subject, they 
have only a series of effects. This attitude, when applied 
to the nude, does produce an effect which I can do nothing 
but condemn : it is contrary to human dignity, it is 
contrary to the true aims of a high art that man should 
be painted as if he were a haystack, a tiger, or a pome- 
granate. Pictures of men and women as stiU life, or as 
mere animal life, have no legitimate place in art. 

This principle, as a principle, should never be forgotten 
in judging nude pictures : it makes the difference between 
Giulio Romano and Michael Angelo, between Etty and 



RAPHAEL AND PINTURICCHIO 247 

Watts, between Rubens and Rembrandt, in so far as 
these painters attempted the nude ; and furthermore, 
the principle extends to pictures that are concerned with 
draped figures — over-absorption with artistic material, 
as such, is the ruin of fine art. And we have to be pecu- 
liarly careful to avoid accepting an artist's own estimate 
of the motive and purpose of his work. To take an 
instance : nothing can be more futile than a criticism of 
Whistler's art based on that master's own expressed opin- 
ions. Whistler was really one of the greatest literary 
painters of his day : in his revolt against the literary, 
" academic " picture he continually produced pictures 
which only differed from them in being superbly conceived 
and painted, and succeeding as episodes when they 
failed. In his curious, perverse way he may label a 
picture an arrangement, a symphony, a study, a note — 
but who can remove the humanity from the portrait of 
his mother, from the Carlyle, from the Connie Gilchrist, 
nay, from the Cremorne Rooms or the Old Bridge at 
Battersea ? Whistler had an intensely literary and critical 
temperament, and was perhaps too occupied with the 
non-artistic side of his subjects. He never painted a 
purely decorative thing in his life, never achieved anything 
whose interest was merely pictorial : his keen, thin, 
waspish personality was far too vivid to escape when 
he was painting. Take even the Peacock room — apart 
from La Princesse, who reigned over it, and showed so 
much of Japanese influence — how clearly the true Whistler 
emerged in the savage satire of his unfortunate patron ! 
For years the art critics, dazzled or terrified by Whistler's 
biting pen, took him at his own valuation, insisted that he 
was a " mere painter," " throwing a pot of paint in the 
face of the British public " — yes, but behind each pot of 
paint, always active, ever evading notice, is the vigorous, 
alert figure of the painter who imposes his personality in 
every dab of paint, in every sweep of his brush. 



248 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE 

I said earlier in this book that Raphael ought to have 
been the god of those who cry " Art for Art's sake." I 
would justify that by putting anyone in the Villa Farne- 
sina and bidding them look at the Cupid and Psyche 
series, and the '' Triumph of Galatea." 

Certainly there are merits about the Cupid and Psyche 
room. The colour, though hard, is vivid, and at times 
beautiful ; there is no delicacy, but there is a certain 
vigour of line ; there is no gracefulness, except occasion- 
ally in the figure of Cupid, but there is a real swing of 
composition. But can any, or all of these, excuse the 
utter absence of soul ? Here you have one of the most 
beautiful stories in the world treated as if it were the 
record of a love affair in the streets off the Piazza di 
Spagna — Cupid is a coarse, sensual youth. Psyche little 
better than a girl off the streets. The great Jupiter is a 
doddering old man, the wonderful Venus a pretty, noxious 
woman, Mercury a sort of aeronautical postman, and the 
court of heaven the amazed clique of a Renascence suburb. 

There is a complete lack of dignity, of life, of reality 
about the whole series. But, say the defenders of Raphael, 
this is not the master's work ; except for one or two 
figures, he probably never touched the frescoes, and 
though the design was his he never meant it to be so 
coarsely executed. Well, let us admit that, and turn to 
the Galatea, painted two years before, and painted by 
Raphael. Its colour is suaver, the line is not so hard, the 
nude figures not so arrogant and vulgar, but is this the 
Polyphemus and Galatea of Theocritus ? 

'* O Nicias, there is no other remedy for Love, 
With ointing, or with sprinkUng on, that ever I could prove, 
Beside the Muses nine ! . . . The cause of this my speech 
A Cyclops is, who lived here with us right wealthily ; 
That ancient Polyphem, when first he loved Galate 
(When, with a bristled heard, his chin and cheeks first clothed 

were :) 
He loved her not with roses, apples, or with curled hair ; 




m 

jumMH 



p 




It 



'lAZZA 1)1 .^I'Al.N/. 



RAPHAEL AND PINTURICCHIO 249 

But with the Furies' rage. All other things he little plied. 

Full often to their fold, from pastures green, without a guide, 

His sheep returned home : when all the while he singing lay 

In honour of his Love, and on the shore consumed away 

From morning until night ; sick of the wound, fast by the heart. 

Which mighty Venus gave, and in his Uver stuck the dart. 

For which this remedy he found, that sitting oftentimes 

Upon a rock and looking on the sea, he sang these rhymes : 

' O Galatea fair, why dost thou shun thy lover true ? 

More tender than a lamb, more white than cheese when it is new, 

More wanton than a calf, more sharp than grapes unripe, I find. 

You use to come, when pleasant sleep my senses all do bind : 

But you are gone again when pleasant sleep doth leave my eye ; 

And as a sheep you run, that on the plain a wolf doth spy.' " 

How far removed from the Greek idyllist's conception is 
this modish figure v/ith the conventional, armorial Amo- 
rini, and the tritons struggling with too-willing maids. It 
is too evident that the painter, whatever were his ambi- 
tions, has really cared for nothing save that symmetry 
of form and grace of colour in which he has hardly ever 
been excelled ; but he has loved not art, but the things 
of art, and so has lost his touch on the real thing. The 
rule for the artist is the same as the rule for the religious 
or the lover : " Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and His 
righteousness ; and all these things shall be added unto 
you." Raphael was the slave of that convention which 
subordinated subject to style, matter to manner — he has 
not even had his reward, for his followers disown him and 
those whom he would fain have followed cannot allow him 
place of honour among them. 

Dominic insists that I am too hard on Raphael ; and 
that all kinds of fallacies lurk in my arguments. ** It 
is all very well, but don't all of us at times, and quite 
legitimately, take pleasure in form as form ? For in- 
stance, the flash of bodies in the sunlit sea, the kind of 
picture that Tuke paints, gives me a great pleasure though 
I may not be a bit moved by any human motive either in 
the actual scene of boys bathing or in such a picture as 



250 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE 

Fred Walker's ' Bathers ' or many of Tuke's : and how 
much human interest is there in Botticelh's * Birth of 
Venus/ that we both love ? Isn't that purely de- 
corative ? " 

*' I don't think so," I retorted. '* There is more idea, 
more of what Blake insisted on as the core of art, in 
Botticelli than in Raphael ; the idea may not be strongly in- 
tellectual — indeed, both in his ' Venus ' and the ' Primavera ' 
it is primarily a spiritual idea — you can feel, swaying 
through the trees of the one and over the waves and 
among the blown petals of the other, the great Renascence 
of nature and the great Renascence of love. There is love 
of the body in both, but it is that love which claims the 
body as vehicle and does not desiderate it as end. I do 
not know whether I can put it better than by saying that 
Botticelli has a sacramental quality that Raphael lacks. 
Botticelli or Crivelli or Lippo Lippi are not content with 
painting beautiful things perfectly : they know that 
beyond their greatest effort is something that no brush can 
ever catch, no pigment ever convey. Raphael has no 
modesty, ' no high humility ' ; he achieves perfection, 
and will not hear of any mystery. There is no unfathomed 
pool of sorrow and love in the eyes of his Madonna ; in 
his pagan pictures there is none of that haunting wistful- 
ness of allegory that I can find in Pompeian frescoes, 
and even at times in Correggio ; he has no simplicity of 
mind, and he has too great a knowledge of his own art. 
Do you remember in the great Sistine Madonna — for it is 
great — at the sides of the picture hang the heavy folds 
of curtains, drawn back that we may see the vision of 
Mary and the Child : well, that is typical of Raphael — 
for him the curtain is drawn — he believes he can take 
away the veil from the sanctuary ; and so, unlike Michael 
Angelo and Leonardo, he fails in rendering the mystery 
of religion ; he paints what he sees — not what he dreams, 
or believes, or hopes. And there is a terrible fate for 



RAPHAEL AND PINTURICCHIO 251 

those who paint only what they see : in the end what 
they see is simply what they paint.*' 

'* Um — yes — does that mean anything in particular ? 
That last sentence ? Hasn't Raphael the right to his 
vision, even if it is not as mystical as Leonardo's or as 
godhke as Buonarroti's ? " 

*' Oh yes ! I love Raphael's pictures, if I could forget 
his subject. Think of that Bible of his in the Loggia. 
The frescoes were not painted by him — at least not all — 
but the lack of taste, of artistic feeling, must be laid on his 
shoulders. Think of the first three — do you remember ? — 
those dreadful, empty, fiat parodies of the magnificent 
three in the Sistine roof ! Instead of that mysterious 
Force, given awefully under the guise of age, first looming 
from clouds of gas and space, then ringed with cherubs, 
supported by seraphs, omnipotently eager and then 
brooding, creating over the earth and water — what do 
you get ? The hideous blue, the hasty, undignified pose, 
the feeble floating figure with the conventionally blown 
scarf, and in the third the dancing, silhouetted old man 
with the two globes against either palm — what a hideously 
inadequate idea of the great creation of Sun and Moon ! " 

'* As you know, I don't like the Loggia any more than 
you ; though there is something to be said for Jacob's 
flight with its amusing camels, and David's triumph has 
a certain processional dignity — and what do you say 
about the Last Supper ? " 

" Again it is poor, it is lacking in imagination. I would 
far rather have the older treatment, with its frank refusal 
to treat that solemn incident naturally ; the treatment 
that gives us the truth about the Supper, at the cost of 
accuracy. It needed a painter with infinitely more 
imagination than Raphael to try to give us the Eucharist 
in a natural way — and you know that Leonardo was not 
satisfied with the Cenacolo he left on the convent wall." 

'' Oh ! of course, I didn't want to put Raphael against 



252 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE 

Leonardo : but I do think you are rather bigoted on the 
point of pictures that are beautiful only because they are 
harmonious, beautiful arrangements of hne, beautiful in 
colour, in chiaroscuro : I'm quite sure that if you are 
treating the whole of a subject conventionally, decoratively, 
you may use the human figure without — as you put it — 

* trying to get the soul in/ For instance, you love the 
Burne- Jones and Morris tapestry in Exeter College Chapel. 
Surely that is just as * merely ' decorative as a Raphael ? " 

" I don't think so. Let's go on to the two big frescoes 
I liked most, the ' Parnassus ' and the oddly miscalled 

* Disputa.' To begin with, isn't it curious that a Christian 
painter should make no difference in his treatment of the 
two subjects ? I don't mean in technique, but in that 
evanescent thing, spirit. For me it looks as if both 
Parnassus and the heaven of heavens were to Raphael 
equally mythical — or equally true. Really it is a certain 
lack of truth that I complain of in each picture. There 
is an aspect of Parnassus which is as true as the Blessed 
Sacrament and the Beatific Vision : indeed, from that 
point of view, Parnassus is only another form in which 
God expresses Himself. But I don't find that in Raphael's 
frescoes. I fancy he believed that he was treating a 
mythical subject in the one fresco and a theological and 
true subject in the other — but he doesn't convey that idea 
to me. You may say this is just the atmosphere of the 
later Renascence ; perhaps it is — but I dislike it and think 
it is definitely untrue, a false and harmful view of reality. 
And you do not find it in Michael Angelo." 

I found myself unconsciously comparing " The Triumph 
of Faith " with that very different picture which I have 
loved for years, " The Adoration of the Lamb," by the Van 
Eycks. Both pictures are lacking in imaginative force ; 
both dwell astonishingly on the externals of religion; and 
there the resemblance ends. The Van Eycks' great master- 



RAPHAEL AND PINTURICCHIO 253 

piece is like the plain, simple creed of a peasant : it is full of 
colour, of order, of precision, of force, of a certain sadness 
that contact with the earth and nights underneath the sky 
bring to men ; but it is a picture that the greatest poet in 
the world ought to find satisfying. It does not attempt 
to represent mystery, to pierce beyond what is revealed to 
the common man ; but in its plain statement of truths, 
believed from the soul, it attains a spiritual dignity which 
makes it as satisfying to the soul as the realities of the 
Sistine Chapel, Fra Angelico's "Vision of Heaven," the cool 
triumph of the "Virgin of the Rocks," or the deep pathos of 
Rembrandt's " Supper at Emmaus." But this "Disputa" 
of Raphael — graceful, clever, full of beautiful detail, full of 
imerring and unboastful precison, yet lacks that one final 
grip, that touch of imaginative unity that would lift it from 
being one of the most beautiful frescoes in Rome to being 
one of the greatest religious pictures in the world. 

I have found that my friends credit me with little 
better than obstinacy when I insist that I can discover 
far more religious feeling in Pinturicchio than in Raphael. 
I do not know that I shall succeed in explaining what I 
felt : but I did feel strongly that in spite — though why 
should one say " in spite " ? — of the painter's love for 
pomp, for gaiety, for gallantry there is far more religion 
in the Borgia Apartments than in the Stanze, which most 
well-conditioned visitors appear to discover full of 
" imaginative beauty " and " religious feeling." It always 
strikes me that Raphael takes people in : he is so — dare I 
say? — " smug," that we have accepted his images of things 
religious as being the things themselves; he is so consciously 
not familiar, so terribly striving after a dignified aloofness 
— always excepting a few of the easel pictures — that such 
frankly " homely " painters as Carpaccio and Pintu- 
ricchio are a little despised as superficial, occupied with 
trivial anecdote and lacking in the grave, sober, religious 
qualities that distinguish Raphael. I think it was just 



254 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE 

this na'ivetS that first charmed me in the Pinturicchios at 
S. Maria del Popolo. The '* Coronation of Our Lady," 
at the Vatican, is not a particularly outstanding example 
of his beautiful work, though there the composition of the 
figures in the foreground, and the gay angels behind Our 
Lord had roused in me a sentiment that quite escaped the 
appeal of Raphael. But when I saw the Assumption in 
S. Maria del Popolo I felt that here was a painter who 
knew he had not the angelic power of Leonardo or the 
superhuman strength of Michael Angelo, and was content 
to be truthful, charming , and graceful. " I suppose 
really," I said to Dominic, as we looked at the Pintu- 
ricchio Assumption, " that what I feel about this work is 
that it represents so much more readily and properly 
that element in the Gospels which in form is rather 
mythical. Of course you know that I believe in the 
historical character of the Birth stories in the Gospels ; 
and I am not inclined to say that the story of the Assump- 
tion, in some of its forms, is anything but historical — but 
this does not prevent me from seeing that the Birth 
stories, the Star, the Magi, the Shepherds, and the later 
legend of the animals are in form akin to the folk tale. 
Where I differ from the modern critic is just here : he 
thinks the Nativity stories are fiction, because they are 
like fairy stories. I think many fairy stories are true 
because they are like the tale of the Nativity — or rather, 
perhaps, that each group represents a reality that the 
world was waiting for, and received in its fulness at the 
Incarnation. 

" I cannot see that because an incident is spiritually and 
poetically appropriate — as the homage of angels, the 
homage of wealth and wisdom and might, the homage of 
lowliness, the homage of the animal world certainly is 
appropriate — that therefore it is likely to be historically 
untrue. I do not see things hke that : where I am sus- 
picious of truth is when I find a manifest discordance 



RAPHAEL AND PINTURICCHIO 255 

between what should happen and what did. Now Pin- 
turicchio — as also Lippo Lippi and Penigino — seems to 
have this view of the mysteries of Our Lord's earthly 
life. Of course the frankly childlike way of presentation 
is not the only way ; you can have Mantegna's intellectual 
vision, Leonardo's mystical vision, or Michael Angelo's 
spiritual vision — and all these are greater : greater too 
is that fervour of simplicity and intense personal devotion 
which you get in Fra AngeHco and Giotto, and which 
lingers, shadow-like, in the paintings of Gozzoli ; but still 
there is room for Pinturicchio and Carpaccio, with their 
simple vision, their gay acceptance of the Cathohc 
stories. Now Raphael seems to have tried to reduce the 
Christian story to a philosophical whole ; to get a syn- 
thesis of theology and religion and art, which he was never 
big enough to manage — and in this effort he misses 
rehgion, misinterprets theology, and spoils his art. Pin- 
turicchio " 

" You mean that Pinturicchio is in the mood of the old 
miracle plays : that he feels rather than thinks ; that he 
worships rather than criticizes ; that he is assisting at 
Mass ? Or perhaps that his art is like the jolly children 
at Ara Coeli who bow and talk to the Bambino as if they 
were in the stable at Bethlehem, and who are ready to 
tug Mary's robe, and pull Joseph's beard ; who are 
fearless, reverent — and yet have not got that glow of 
personal devotion which, say, little Philip Neri had — and 
which distinguishes Fra Angelico from Pinturicchio ? " So 
Dominic. 

" Exactly : that's just what I wanted. This merry 
child of Umbria is like the Jewish boys and girls of whom 
Our Lord spoke. He pipes, and the critics — heavily 
serious after a round of the Stanze — come in and refuse 
to dance : but we — we will go and dance, shall we, before 
the wonderful, cheerful frescoes of the Borgia rooms ? " 

" But first just look at this story of St Jerome again. 



256 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE 

I'm not very keen on the interior, except for those two 
dogs, and the beautiful ghmpse through the window ; 
but isn't the one with the hon a perfect joy ? There's 
an amusing resemblance between the old saint and the 
lion which I'm sure the painter intended, and the two 
brothers standing by the good beast's tail are so successful 
— the half-nervous, half-shocked attitude of the clean- 
shaven one, as who should say, * Really, we knew Jerome 
was odd, but a lion ! ' And the rather cross, severe 
expression of the older man. ' Well, Jerome has no busi- 
ness to go after lions at his time of life. He ought to be 
thinking of other things.' Or do you think I'm too flip- 
pant ? " 

" Not a bit, Dominic ; it's just the note of the picture ; 
and to my mind that note of art is vastly more healthy 
and religious than the forced Raphael touch, or the 
bravura of Rubens. And see how the same painter can 
really achieve a noble effect in the picture of Jerome in the 
Desert. That landscape, with the menhir in the fore- 
ground, is not the work of a mere careless, joyful person 
with no interest beyond flowers and marriage-bells and 
cloth-of-gold. The figure of the saint, too, has, in its 
simplicity and directness, a real note of aspiration that I 
seek for in vain in " 

" Oh ! poor Raphael, do leave him alone ! And we 
will go to the Borgia rooms." 

Of course critics dispute as to how much of the fresco- 
painting in the rooms of the Borgias is by the master 
himself, and how nmch is by pupils ; but there is no doubt 
that the influence of Pinturicchio is predominant and 
availing. The subjects vary from Egyptian mythology 
to allegorical paintings of Grammar and Rhetoric ; one 
includes scenes from the Uves of Mary and Our Lord ; 
while you have the story of Susannah, of S. Barbara and 
S. Catherine. The fresco of Susannah is an astonishingly 



RAPHAEL AND PINTURICCHIO 257 

simple example of the skill with which the artist can get 
his story into small scope ; and in the light treatment of 
the scenes, and the beautiful creatures in the foreground 
we can certainly see Pinturicchio's hand. Particularly 
pleasant is the little rabbit, sitting up right in the front, 
with protesting paws and ears avid for any scandal, while 
her mate crouches down by the fountain ashamed and 
annoyed at the wickedness of the elders. 

The richest of any of the frescoes is the meeting between 
S. Catherine and Maxentius, in which are portraits of 
contemporary celebrities such as Prince Djem and Andrew 
Paleologus, about whom the curious may read in Mgr. Bur- 
chard's diary. Yet gorgeous as this fresco is, it must yield 
for beauty to the two frescoes in the Hall of the Mysteries. 

One represents the Annunciation. The scene is in an 
Italian house, and in arrangement the picture differs little 
from the ordinary Itahan painting. Our Lady kneels on 
one side, submissive, tender, with none of the mystery of a 
Leonardo, but with a certain grace and a beautiful charm 
that is peculiarly individual : Gabriel, crowned with flowers , 
and with the great wings of some mythical bird, kneels 
before her, and between them is a bowl of roses. That pot 
of roses might be Pinturicchio's signature : it gives a 
personal touch in its prominence. Over the roses hovers 
the Padre Eterno supported by those little cherubim that 
are so lovely and so frequent in the master's pictures. 
Greater than this, evidence of the real power of Pintu- 
ricchio, is the Resurrection. Our Lord, with the pennant 
of victory in His hand, has arisen out of the tomb; cherubs 
support Him — and below are the Roman guards, and, 
kneeling in adoration, his Holiness Pope Alexander VI. 

One's first feeling is of incredulity that this heavy, 
gross, amiable face can be the countenance of the man 
whom centuries have agreed to execrate — one's next is 
that Alexander must have been better than the tradition, 
that the Orsini did really blacken his character, and the 



258 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE 

German master of ceremonies lied in hatred. But it is a 
mistake, I suppose, to assume that vice such as Borgia is 
credited with need be associated with active mahgnancy. 
It is quite possible — even likely — that a deep indolence 
and disbelief, a weariness and slackness of character led 
the Borgia Pope into his worst excesses. Anyway, here 
he is painted with unrelenting fidelity ; not a line left out, 
not a feature softened. Pinturicchio may be a shallow, 
light-hearted painter ; but he knew, did he not, how to 
tell the plain truth in plain terms ? " Plain terms " per- 
haps hardly suits this bit of revealing, veracious portrait- 
ure : I sometimes think that Pinturicchio is here liker 
Browning than anyone else. He has not Browning's 
astonishing intellectual curiosity, that amazing mental 
vivacity which inspires the Renascence poems ; but he has 
something of that master's splendour and simplicity of 
statement — that terrible candour which is so vastly more 
effective than any satire, such as Goya's. Pope Alexander, 
sitting, one can see him, rather vainly, wearing his cope 
with a boy's heavy pride, arranging his fat hands — how 
often the Borgia hands, so bewraying in character, reappear 
in Pinturicchio's pictures — to their best advantage, asked 
the painter, " Is that the right position for my head ? " 
And one can hear the painter's quiet assent, as a smile 
flickers over his face and he begins his study for this, the 
greatest of his portraits. 

And so we see him and wonder. " This is all ; this 
torpid, foolish blown old man is the terrible Borgia ! And 
that spoilt-looking, rather mean-faced figure kneeling at 
the other side, and gazing arrogantly out of the fresco, 
is Cesare ! " Moral indignation is a good and necessary 
thing, but is it, I wonder, half so effective as this relentless 
speaking of the truth, this fearless rendering of two 
common sinners in their habit as they lived ? There is, 
however, one touch by which Pinturicchio felt he must 
emphasize what and whom he has been painting : the face 




ALEXANDER VI 

FINTURICCHIO 



Borgia Rooms. The V'atica) 



RAPHAEL AND PINTURICCHIO 259 

of the Risen Christ is stern, even sad, and rather full of 
foreboding, and the eyes of Him are turned away, away 
from the man who was His vicar. On Peter, in his hasty, 
hot-tempered sin, Jesus looked : but from this, this self- 
satisfied, indulgent, carefully-sinful old man the Lord 
Jesus averts His countenance ; and the blessing of His 
wounded hand falls, out of the fresco, on those who are in 
the room. 

" Is it Zeus, or Moses, or Tiber, or Pan } " So Dominic 
before the great statue of Michael Angelo, designed for 
Julius's tomb in San Pietro in Vincoli. And indeed I 
think the question is excusable. The draperies are 
ancient Roman, the beard is the beard of a river-god, the 
horns are the horns of Pan — and the eyes ? There indeed 
you do find the burning anger, the haste and zeal of the 
lawgiver who smashed the Divine tables, and devised that 
awful punishment for Korah, Dathan and Abiram. There 
is a French critic who says, " ce n'est pas Moise, le plus 
doux des hommes, mais c'est un espece de Jupiter tonnant 
et remerant TOlympe par le froncement de son sourcil." 
Anything less true than " le plus doux des hommes " can 
scarcely be imagined : the Moses of the Pentateuch is 
from the very beginning hasty, fiery-tempered, ready to 
argue with Jehovah, to slay and to kill, to curse and 
threaten, to wade through blood out of the country of 
bondage to the land of promise. No, it is not that this 
statue is too terrible for Moses : it is not terrible enough. 
If he must have horns ^ they should have been curved and 
longer, not the stubby, pushing pair that emerge so 
abruptly from the cataract of hair. And that cascade of 
beard, in which the right hand is tangled, is a thing of the 
sea or the river : it is heavy with the salt of undiscovered 
oceans, and dank with unattempted rivers. It parts and 

1 In giving them Michael Angelo followed an old error in the 
Vulgate, Exodus, 34, 35. 



26o A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE 

breaks and falls like some great waterfall, till it reaches 
the huge shelter of the left hand. In those hands, with their 
great, masterful fingers, and in the angr^^ amazed eyes, 
eyes full of wrath at the stubbornness of the people, I 
find the Moses who broke the rock and bullied the cowardly 
Jew away from the delicacies of Egypt to the hard life of 
Canaan. Here is the Moses who slew the Egyptian, and 
cursed as he saw the light people dancing and capering 
round the calf of gold. What is he doing now ? Is he 
watching that dance ? Scarcely, I think, for he saw that 
gay scene of silly sin as he strode down Sinai, out of the 
cloud and the glory, with the favour of Jehovah's presence 
still about him. No : if we look through Deuteronomy 
I do not think we can doubt what was in the sculptor's 
mind when he represented this seated lawgiver. This is 
the Moses who was an hundred and twenty years old ; 
whose eye was not dim, nor his natural force abated. And 
these are the words that he is uttering over the tomb that 
should have been the tomb of Giuliano della Rovere the 
Lord Pope Julius II : 

** It shall come to pass, if thou wilt not hearken unto the 
voice of the Lord thy God, to observe to do all his com- 
mandments and his statutes which I command thee this 
day ; that all these curses shall come upon thee, and over- 
take thee : Cursed shalt thou be in the city, and cursed 
shalt thou be in the field. Cursed shall be thy basket and 
thy store. Cursed shall be the fruit of thy body, and the 
fruit of thy land, the increase of thy kine, and the flocks 
of thy sheep. Cursed shalt thou be when thou comest in, 
and cursed shalt thou be when thou goest out. The Lord 
shall send upon thee cursing, vexation, and rebuke, in 
all that thou sett est thine hand unto for to do, until thou 
be destroyed, and until thou perish quickly ; because of 
the wickedness of thy doings, whereby thou hast forsaken 
me. The Lord shall make the pestilence cleave unto 
thee, until he have consumed thee from off the land, 



RAPHAEL AND PINTURICCHIO 261 

whither thou goest to possess it. The Lord shall smite 
thee with a consumption, and with a fever, and with an 
inflammation, and with an extreme burning, and with the 
sword, and with blasting, and with mildew ; and they 
shall pursue thee until thou perish. And thy heaven that 
is over thy head shall be brass, and the earth that is under 
thee shall be iron. The Lord shall make the rain of thy 
land powder and dust : from heaven shall it come down 
upon thee, until thou be destroyed. The Lord shall 
cause thee to be smitten before thine enemies : thou shalt 
go out one way against them, and fiee seven ways before 
them : and shalt be removed into all the kingdoms of the 
earth. And thy carcase shall be meat unto all fowls of 
the air, and unto the beasts of the earth, and no man 
shall fray them away. . . . And the Lord shall scatter 
thee among all people, from the one end of the earth even 
unto the other ; and there thou shalt serve other gods, 
which neither thou nor thy fathers have known, even wood 
and stone. And among these nations shalt thou find no 
ease, neither shall the sole of thy foot have rest : but the 
Lord shall give thee there a trembling heart, and failing 
of eyes, and sorrow of mind : and thy life shall hang in 
doubt before thee ; and thou shalt fear day and night, and 
shalt have none assurance of thy life : In the morning 
thou shalt say, Would God it were even ! and at even thou 
shalt say. Would God it were morning ! for the fear of 
thine heart wherewith thou shalt fear, and for the sight of 
thine eyes which thou shalt see. And the Lord shall bring 
thee into Egypt again with ships, by the way whereof I 
spake unto thee, Thou shalt see it no more again : and 
there ye shall be sold unto your enemies for bondmen and 
bondwomen, and no man shall buy you." 

" Ye shall be sold unto your enemies for bondmen and 
bondwomen, and no man shall buy you ! " That is the 
motto for this terrible image. It is easy to speculate how 
far the sculptor was moved to anger by the perpetual 



262 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE 

disturbances to his work at the hands of changing masters, 
and how far he was occupied with the thought of JuUus's 
Itahan poHcy and the difficulties that beset him : but I 
prefer to think that here, as in " The Last Judgment," it is 
horror of sin — how acquired who can tell ? — that broods 
on those mighty brows and flashes in those august eyes. 
The lightness, the gaiety, the warmth, the honey-coloured 
processions of popes and princes, and their myrmidons, 
all " dancing down the primrose path to the everlasting 
bonfire," roused in the great heart and mind of Buon- 
arroti the flame of a devouring passion, a burning and 
consuming wrath — and here, in the guise of Moses, with 
the most terrible execration ever penned pouring over 
that pouted lip, we have the soul of Michael Angelo gazing 
out in anger and heart-broken sorrow at the light laughter 
and easy sin of the people of Rome dancing, dancing in 
the presence chamber of the wrath of God. 

Not in this mood, nevertheless, would I remember 
Michael Angelo : in his old age, after the terrors of the 
Last Judgment, he turned again to the vision of the dead 
Christ that had occupied him in his youth. In the court- 
yard of the Palazzo Rondanini is a fragment of a group 
which is called on the pediment a Pieta. It is, I believe, 
part of a design for an Entombment. Vaguely, as you gaze 
at it, the composition becomes apparent. Mary, older 
than Our Lady in the Vatican group, is supporting the 
Lord's body, which hangs limp, inert and so tired ; but 
she has not received it from above. It is evident too 
that the design is meant to represent rather a historical 
incident than a devotional moment such as is shown in a 
Pieta : and under the Christ's right leg is a hand, whose 
arm is broken off just above the elbow, which belongs 
probably to one of the other Marys, or to S. Joseph of 
Arimathasa. The moment, I think, that the sculptor 
has chosen is when Joseph has taken off the garment of 




MOSES 

MICHAEL AN(;KI. 



^</;/ Pietro ai I'lncoli 



RAPHAEL AND PINTURICCHIO 263 

the Crucifixion and Mary and he are laying the sacred 
body down to wrap it in '* the clean linen cloth," before 
it is placed in *' his own new tomb." Michael Angelo has 
chosen the one point of time when Mary, in an abandon- 
ment of grief, shows to the world, to us, her Son, and bids 
us see how we have dealt with Him. From her lips she 
cries, in His stead, " Was ever sorrow like unto my 
sorrow?" " Popule mens, quid feci tibi ? aut in quo 
contristavi ? Responde mihi. Quia eduxi te de terra 
Aegypti ; parasti Crucem Salvatori tuo. 

" Quid ultra debui facere tibi, et non feci? Ego quidem 
plantavi te vineam meam speciosissimam : et tu facta es 
mihi nimis amara : aceto namque sitim meam potasti : 
et lancea perforasti latus Salvatori tuo." 

Yet there is no anger here ; nothing but a waiting, 
anxious sorrow, nothing but an eager hope that her ears 
may hear the reply of us. His people, singing and beseech- 
ing : 

" Agios o Theos, 

Sanctus Deus, 

Agios ischyros, 

Sanctus fortis, 

Agios athanatos, eleison imas, 

Sanctus immortalis, miserere nobis ! " 

And behind the cry of Mary is the cry of Michael Angelo. 
In this unfinished group the great artist, who was working 
at it up to the very day of his death, makes his last appeal 
to his countrymen, to all who love God and art. The note 
of anger has passed : as he nears the dim waters, and the 
grey gate of death, he cannot thunder out his denuncia- 
tions on our backslidings, our feebleness, our pitiable sins. 
He shows us in his old age what he showed us in youth — 
the dead Christ — in the arms of His mother, and he begs us 
to awake Him. 

There is a beautiful legend that, after the Crucifixion, 
Peter went away and sat, dry-eyed, alone, thinking. His 



264 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE 

brain was hot, his head dizzy with remorse and anger ; 
he could not weep. After that sudden gush of tears, that 
bitter crying outside the palace of Caiaphas, he had not 
shed a tear. So he sat, refusing all comfort, wondering, 
wondering whether he or Judas were the worse sinner. 
And Mary, the Lord's mother, was sitting alone too, and 
weeping softly ; and to her on the Saturday night came 
the Beloved Disciple, and told her that he was afraid for 
Peter. " For he sits there, Mother, staring out into the 
night, and he will not speak, nor eat, nor weep." And 
Mary took from her lap the garment without seam — for 
the centurion who believed had given it her — and she said, 
" Take this to Peter." And the Beloved Disciple ran back 
to Peter, who was still sitting in the dark room, now 
lightened by the first signs of dawn, and went up to the 
Rock, and put the garment in his hands, saying, " Behold, 
the Lord's robe." And Peter fumbled for a moment 
with the linen he had so often handled, in affection, in 
prayer, and in rebuke, and he put his head down on to it 
and burst into tears. 

At the very moment that Peter wept the Lord arose. 

And still when the penitent weeps, there is ever a new 
Resurrection of Christ. That is what Michael Angelo is 
asking for. *' Come," he cries to his own age and to ours, 
" come. You have killed the Saviour, but a tear will 
awaken Him ! Come, you have slain your Lord, but 
Mary still shows him, dead, naked, tired, and calls to you, 
' Was there ever sorrow like unto my sorrow ? ' This is 
the triumph of love, the love that goes beyond death and 
shame and pride — the love that will take no denial, no 
refusal — the love that forgives all that the bitterness and 
folly and cruelty of man has done — if only man will weep. 
Come to the feet of the dead Christ, and by your tears 
renew once again the mystery of the Eternal Resurrection, 
the serene and secure victory of life." 




VIEW FROM THE PINCIO 



CHAPTER XIV 

THE HOLY FATHER 

IT is a little difficult at first to gauge the attitude in 
Rome towards the Holy Father, Papa Sarto ; you are 
quite sure, soon, that the love felt for him is not that 
which was felt for Pio Nono, and that he does not engender 
the respect that Leo XHI. did. Romans are odd : they 
seem to care but little for the opinions of the outsider, and 
yet, in their hearts, they were genuinely pleased at the 
respect and admiration which Leo and his policy produced 
in Europe and among non-Catholics. And Pio Decimo 
worries them. It is all very well to have a " saint " for 
a Pope, but is he not making them a little ridiculous in 
the eyes of Europe ? What is this Modernism about 
which Papa Sarto fusses so ; who heard of it before his 
encyclical ? And he seems afraid of it, too. Papa Pecci 
was never afraid. He rebuked heresies, of course ; but 
not with so much personal wrath, not with that note of 
tears and rage in his voice that can be detected in Pio 
Decimo's utterances. And why does the Holy Father 
bother so much about music — not that it makes any differ- 
ence : the good nuns of Trinita de' Monti go on with their 
luscious, florid, artificial singing — and the choir of San 
Pietro in Vaticano don't sing the pure Plain Chant. " But 
there it is " — a Roman said to me — *' the Holy Father 
makes a great fuss, and a great noise — but we feel he is 
losing; and a Pope shouldn't lose — he must either win 
or die ; he mustn't be beaten, least of all when he is in the 
wrong. No, no ; I don't say he is in the wrong, God 
forbid : but there are who do." 
265 



266 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE 

The result of much talking and thinking about the Holy 
Father was to make Dominic and me feel definitely sorry 
for him : he seemed so clearly to be a man in the wrong 
place, guided by foolish or bigoted advisers. We had 
come to Rome, not intending to try and have an audience : 
for one thing we had little time ; for another we didn't 
want to be bothered with many introductions — for intro- 
ductions meant dinners, and dinners meant garments of 
state — and we were travelling as poor pilgrims. Still 
when Dom Anselmo asked us if we would like to have an 
audience, we rather jumped at it. We both had things 
we wanted the Holy Father to bless : and after all, it 
seemed rather wrong for Catholics to come to Rome and 
not see the chief pastor, the Patriarch of the West, the 
Head of the Latin Church. Even although he had been 
unkind to Tyrrell, and rather unjust to Romolo Murri — 
still he was Pope, and I felt sure that, were either Tyrrell 
or Murri asked, they would reply, *' Of course, you should 
pay your respects to his Holiness." 

So we said thank you to Dom Anselmo, and he said he 
would arrange it. 

Then he came back to ask if we would like a private or a 
public audience ; we thought that as we had so little 
Italian, it would not be fair to ask for a private audience, 
so we said "public" — and how often we regretted it after- 
wards. 

For we never saw the Holy Father. 

The arrangements went beautifully. We went and 
waited in an ante-chamber, and saw rather business-like 
clerks, who had no idea of time and were not fond of 
English people. Then, on another day, we had an inter- 
view with Mgr. Bisletti, than whom no one could have 
been kinder or more courteous, and he fixed our interview 
three days ahead, on Monday, and said the tickets would 
be sent to our hotel. 

Monday came — but no tickets. We waited — and 



THE HOLY FATHER 267 

waited : and then called up Dom Anselmo on the tele- 
phone. He was full of regrets and assurances ; he got 
into communication with the Vatican. " Was his Holi- 
ness receiving?" Back came the answer: ** No ; not 
to-day." And afterwards we discovered that Papa Sarto 
had the gout. 

Now at a public audience the Holy Father receives in 
this manner. The faithful wait in a large room ; then he 
comes in, all kneel down in a row, and he walks along, 
bestowing his blessing, and speaking a word or two. At 
a private audience the visitor is ushered into his presence, 
and goes up to the Holy Father seated in his chair. He 
managed to receive privately two or three parties on 
Tuesday ; but had no public audiences. 

But the next day, so Dom Anselmo assured us, would 
be all right. Wednesday and no tickets ! I said, 
" Dominic, we will go to the Vatican." We went, and 
sought Mgr. Bisletti. Alas, he was not to be seen ! 
So said the business-like clerk. Well, was the Holy Father 
receiving this morning, and could he see us ? " We were 
to have left Rome yesterday," I said, ** and we have 
waited on purpose : cannot it be managed ? " 

" To-morrow, no doubt." 

" But to-morrow we shall be gone." 

*' At what time ? " 

'* Oh ! about two o'clock — to Pisa." 

" Well, to-morrow morning you shall have your tickets." 

I don't know whether that clerk had taken a dislike to 
me — he was a sour-faced, ambitious, lean creature — but 
anyway, for his own purposes, he lied. To-morrow came 
and no tickets were forthcoming. 

Once more we sallied out. The same clerk received us. 
We had not had our tickets ? Dear, dear ! Well, to- 
morrow 

Then I got rather cross, which was stupid. I pointed 



268 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE 

out that to-morrow never came : that we were anxious 
to see the Holy Father, not from curiosity, but from 
rehgion. I asked him if Mgr. Bisletti would like this 
behaviour : would the Santo Padre care to know that 
two poor pilgrims were being kept from him, for no reason 
at all ? 

" Well, well, it may be arranged — you have clothes ? " 

" But of course we are clothed " 

" Ah ! but those clothes — they are not suitable " 



This was really annoying. I knew the rule that you 
must go to the audience in dress clothes — a reasonable 
rule in approaching royalty ; but Dom Anselmo had 
assured us that our garments, which were black, would do 
perfectly well. So we had not, as we could have, borrowed 
dress clothes from our friends in the hotel. As I have 
said, we were travelling pilgrimwise, and had not bothered 
about our ganiients. 

So I told the clerk why we were not in ** decent " 
clothes. He was not impressed. He hated, I am sure, 
either me or Dom Anselmo. He said Dominic's vesture, 
which, of course, was clerical, might do — but mine ! and 
he shuddered as though I had come in rowing shorts. 

We argued : we were persuasive : we allured into the 
conversation another clerk who was more like a human 
being. I trusted that Mgr. Bisletti would appear — but no 
intervention came, and we went away at last, sad and 
rather angry. 

At the hotel Dom Anselmo was awaiting us for a fare- 
well luncheon : he was all smiles. 

** You have had your audience ? " 

I told him, rather shortly, I'm afraid, that we had not, 
and explained what had happened. 

He was furious : be besought us to stay overnight and 
he would take us himself in the morning — but we did not 
allow ourselves to be persuaded. And on the whole I am 
glad — because I'm not sure that we should ever have got 



THE HOLY FATHER 269 

that audience. It was not our day : and it needs rather 
more training than I had had to deal adequately with 
Italian dilatoriness. " To-morrow " is the Roman motto. 

If only Rome, the Rome of the Church and the saints, 
would take " To-morrow " as her motto : " To-morrow " with 
another sense, with the significance not of postponement, 
but of expectation, and of hope and trust in the future ! 
Too often if we go to Rome for advice, for help, for encour- 
agement, we are answered, '* Yesterday." There is a 
great belief in the past, there is a sound feeling of respect 
and love for all that is beautiful and lovely in her old 
history, in the dear dead, in the gorgeous periods of the 
faith : there is, very often, in some matter a great atten- 
tion to "To-day," a great belief in being ready for the things 
of the moment, for the men of the age, for the ambitions 
of the nations : but the Church should claim *' To-morrow " 
as well as '' Yesterday " and " To-day." Hers are — or 
should be — the strong hope of youth, the keen desire, the 
fervent zeal, the increasing purpose, the settled knowledge 
that sway the hearts of the younger generation, that throb 
in the bosoms of the mothers that are to be. 

In the great basilicas the high altar is always a Papal 
altar : it is never used except when the Holy Father says 
Mass, or his legate ; and now that he is secluded in the 
Vatican, the Seven Churches, saving San Pietro, do not 
see their bishop. And when others say Mass in those 
churches, at some of the altars they face west, or north, or 
south, but not eastwards. The Holy Father when he 
celebrates stands behind the altar and looks down the 
church towards the east, towards the dawn. When will 
he do that again ? When will the Pope remember that 
the fetters with which he is bound are like the clothes worn 
by the Emperor in Andersen's fairy story ? They have 
been forged on no anvil and smelted in no furnace, and 
are only visible to the careful eye of diplomatic servility. 



270 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE 

When will he let those ghostly chains of a dead policy 
drop from his hands and feet, and walk out, under the 
nodding ostrich plumes, to the basilica that holds the 
metropolitan chair, and there, with his face to the Dawn, 
with his back to the West and its dead past, sing, confi- 
dently and triumphantly, the morning song of the Catholic 
Church : 

Gloria in excelsis Deo, et in terra pax hominibus bonae 
voluntatis ! 



INDEX 



AcTE, 51 

Alcibiades, 43, 173 
Alexamenos, mocking of, 53 
Angelico, Fra, 3, 25 ; frescoes by, in 
the Chapel of P.ope Nicholas, 30-33 ; 

253, 255 
Antinous, cult and statue of, 62-64 
Appia, Via, greatness of, 133- 134 
Aristophanes, 43 

Bambino, the, of Ara Cceli, devotion 

to, 185 and jf 
Bandelaire, spirit of Imperial Rome 

and, 115 
Benediction, nature of service, loi- 

102 ; at the Convent of the Maternal 

Heart of Mary, 102-104; dangers 

and beauties of, 105-106 
Bernardino, S., room of, 190 
Bernini, 8, 16; Apollo and Daphne, 

163; David, 163 ; work at S. Peter's, 

164 ; statue of S. Theresa, 164 ; 208, 

238, 
Bessarion, Cardinal, tomb of, 179 
Borghese, Pauline, statue of, 165 
Borghese Villa, the Titian at, 159 ; 

other works of art at, 160-165 
Borgia, Alexander, 2 ; tomb of, 87 ; 

portrait of, 257 
Botticelli, Sandro, 3, 22, 25, 250 
Boxer, the Seated, 60 
Bramante, 21 

Browning, R., the Pope and, 200 
Bruno, Giordano, death of, 117 
Brutus, 2 

C/ESAR, Julius, 2, 3,9, 40, 43 

Caligula, 50 

Campagna, the, 5 ; Etruscans and, 40 ; 

contrasted with Cornwall, 122 ; 

character of, 127-129, 133 - 137 ; 

shepherd of, 152 
Canova, statue of Pauline Borghese by, 

165 

271 



Carpaccio, 253, 255 

Catacombs, the, 16 ; in the sixteenth 

century, 78-81 ; of Domitilla, 82 
Catherine, S., of Genoa, 116 
Cataline, 9 
Cato, 40 
Catullus, 3 
Csecilia, S., life and martyrdom of, 

218-227, 243 
Character, the ancient Roman, 40 ; ruin 

of, 41-43 ; compared with the 

Athenian, 43 
Chaucer, 219 ; and legend of Caecilia, 

220-224 
Churches — 

Andrea, S., della Valle, 4; Uniate 
services at, 93 and^ 

Angelo, S., in Pescheria, 239 

Anselmo, S., 9 ; High Mass at, 90- 

93 
Apostoli, SS., 176 ; Disputa at, 180- 

182 
Athanasius, S., 7 ; Vespers at, 94 
Clemente, S., 8, 107-112, 117 
Croce in Gerusalemme, S., ^"^f, 206 
Francesca, S., 232 
Giovanni, S., in Laterano, 83, 197- 

,203. 
Giovanni e Paolo, SS., 68 
Giuseppe, S., dei Falegnami, Low 

Mass at, 56-59 
Lorenzo, S., 83,211, 218 
Lorenzo, S., in Panisperna, 215 
Maria, S., Antica, 35 
Maria, S.,in Ara Coeli, 6, 185-191 
Maria, S., in Campitelli, 178, 239 
Maria, S., in Cosmedin, 117 
Maria, S., Maggiore, 83, 204-210 
Maria, S., sopra Minerva, 7, 9, 30, 

I17-121 
Maria, S., del Popolo, 254 
Maria, S., in Trastevere, 240-243 
Maria, S., Egiziaca, 112 



272 



A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE 



Churches — continued 
Paolo, S., 83, 129, 133 
Pietro, S., in Vaticano, 7, 14-21, 83 ; 
the crypt of, 85-88 ; sculpture in, 
87 ; High Mass at, 106-107 
Pietro, S., in Vincoli, 259 
Sebastiano, S., 83-84, 133, 206 
Churches, lovable, why rare in Rome, 

113-116 
Cicero, 9, 40, 43 
Cincinnatus, 43 
Clement XIV., Pope, 176 
Coleridge, S.T., 163 
Colosseum, the, 8, 9, 42, 44 
Constantine, 47, 200 
Cornwall compared with the Cam- 

pagna, 122 
Correggio, Danae of, 161-163 ; 246, 250 
Country, effect of, on man, 123-127 
Crassus, wealth of, 46 
Crivelli, 22, 172, 250 
Crucifix, late appearance of, in Christian 
art, 71 ; reasons for, 72-73, 81 (and 
note) 

Dead, the, position of, in the Christian 

life, 75-77, 79 
Domenichino, 21, 93 
Domine quo Vadis, story and chapel, 

154 
V Doria Gallery, 156 

Doubt, the need for, 183-184 
Durandus, tomb of, 9, 118 

English, manners of the, 145, 148-149; 

attitude at worship, 201-202 
Eugenius, Pope, 179 
Euripides, 43, i73, ^74 

Forum, the, 3, 8; manner of seeing, 
36 ; repairs to, 37 ; confusion of, 
37 ; how to enjoy, 38 ; Basilica 
^Emilia in, 41 ; Venus Cloacina in, 
42 ; Imperial remains in, 46 ; Fons 
Juturnae, 47 ; the House of the 
Vestals, 47 

Francesca, S., 3, 35, 232; story and 
life of, 233 239, 243 

Francis, S., 192 

Genzano, 138; real attraction of, 

150.152 
George IV., portrait of, 173 
Gibbon, E., 191 



Giorgione, 159 

Giotto, 255 

Gothic, the, hardly found in Rome, 9 ; 

in S. Maria sopra Minerva, 118- 120; 

in San Paolo, 129, 130; at San 

Giovanni in Laterano, 199 
Goya, revolutionary art of, 165-166 
Gozzoli, Benozzo, 32, 172, 255 
Gracchi, the, 9 
Gregory, S., of Nazianzus, tomb of, 

20 
Gregory the Great, 3, 9 ; tomb of, 20 

Hadrian, buildings of, 43-46 ; and the 
cult of Antinous, 62-64 ; and Baude- 
laire, 115 

Hermaphroditus^ the^ 61 

Homer, 43 

Horace, 3, 38, 174 

Innocent X., Pope, portrait of, 157- 
159 

James III., King (the Old Pretender), 
lying-in-state of, 178 ; prayer guild 
of, 179 

Jesuits, the, 164 ; real work of, 176-177 

John and Paul, SS., 68-70, 74 

Julian, 9, 14 

Juvenal, 47, 50 

KiNGSLEY, C, nature and, 124 

Lateran, the, 170-175 
Lawrence S., story of, 211-218 
Lawrence, Sir Thomas, 172 
Leonardo da Vinci, 21 ; mystery of, 25, 

26, 120, 250-251,255 
Lippi, Filippo, 25, 250, 255 
Lippi, Filippino, frescoes in S. Maria 

sopra Minerva, I19, 120 
Loretto, Litany of, 103 
Lucan, 43 
Lucretius, 43 
Luini, 25 

Mamertine, the, 35, 55, 

Mantegna, 25, 255 

Marcus Aurelius, 9, 14, 43 ? character 

of, 66 ; statue of, 67 
Martial, 51 
Mass, the. Canon of, 57 ; High, at San 



INDEX 



273 



Anselmo, 90-93 ; after the Uniate 
rites, 93-100; why not said in ver- 
nacular, 100 ; at S. Peter's, 107 

Michael Angelo Buonarroti, 3, 6, 14 ; 
and Raphael, 21, 22 ; Pieta by, 22- 
24 ; directness of, 25 ; Sistine 
frescoes, 26-30, 119; The Risen 
Christ, 121 ; 156, 250, 251, 255 ; 
Moses, 259-262 ; Rondanini group, 
262-264; death and burial of, 179- 
180 

Modernism, Roman officials and, 18-20, 
265 

Moles of Hadrian, 44 

Mommsen, Theodor, Roman slavery 
and, 51 

Monte Cavo, 141, 142 

Mosaic, beauty of, 109- no; at S. 
Maria Maggiore, 206-208 

Munday, Anthony, account of Cata- 
combs, 79-81 

Nemi, 138, 140, 145 ; priest and grove 

of, 146-148 
Nero, 8, 14, 47, 50 ; Simon Magus 

and, 228 
Niccolo di Liberatore(Niccolo 

Alunno), 168-169 
Nietzche, F., 174 
Nude, the, in art, 245-247, 249 

Orcagna, 32 

Oxford, suburbs and, 5, 6 ; Matthew 
Arnold on, 126 ; modernity of, 127 

Paganism, survival of, in Christian art, 

68-71, 171, 245 
Palatine, the, 3 ; associations of, 50 ; 

Domus Liviae in, 50, 51 ; Paeda- 

gogium, 51-54 
Pantheon, the, 8 ; beauty of, restored by 

Hadrian, 44 ; consecrated, 76 
Paul, S., 3, 10, 33, 35, 51; slavery 

and, 52 ; in prison, 56 ; tomb of, 

129 ; head of, 196 
Paul, S., of the Cross, 74, 75 
Pericles, 43, 73 
Perugino, 22, 255 
Peter, S., 2, 3, 10; arrival in Rome 

and martyrdom, 12-13 ; basilica of, 

14-21; 33> 35; in prison, 55, 56; 

head of, 196 ; Simon Magus and, 

231 
Philip Neri, S., 116, 133 



Phryne, 60 

Pinturicchio, 2, 25, 30, 93, 150, 190, 

253 ; at S. Maria del Popolo, 254- 

256 ; Borgia apartments, 256-259 
Pius IV., 20 
Pius IX., the travellers and, 3 ; 20 ; 

Liberals and, 199-200; 211; tomb 

of, 218 
PiusX., 9, 18, 265 and^ 
Plain-song, the beauty of, 91-93 ; 

Palestrina and, 107 
Plato, 43, 173, 174 
Pompey the Great, 40 
Pope, the, position of and devotion to, 

18-20; and his see, 198 
Praxiteles, emotion in sculpture and, 60 

Raphael, 3 ; Michael Angelo and, 21- 
22; 25, 30, 150; Transfiguration, 
166 ; Cupid and Psyche, 248 ; Gala- 
tea, 249 ; Loggie and Stanze, 250- 
252 ; religious feeling of, 253, 255, 
256 

Relics, 74-76, 195-196, 225, 238 

Reynolds, Sir J., 21 

Rienzi, 203 

Roads, Roman, 133 

Rocca di Papa, 140 

Romulus, 9 

Rothenburg on the Tauber, 5 

Ruskin, J., pathetic fallacy and, 124; 
S. Coecilia and, 219, 226 

Sancta Sanctorum, chapel of, 196- 
197 

Saints, at S. 1 eter's shrine, 15 ; in- 
terference of, 143-145 

Scala, Santa, origin of, 194 ; devotion 
of, 195-196 

Sculpture, Roman, realism of, 38, 59 ; 
Seated Boxer, 60 ; Hermaphroditits, 
61 ; Antinous, 62-64; Laocoon, 65 ; 
Apollo Belvedere, 65 ; Nihts, 65 

Seneca, 43, 54, 230 

Sermon, a bad, 100 ; disadvantages of, 
182-185 

Shrines, use of, 114 

Simon Magus, legend of, 228-233 

Size, heresy of, 38 ; Oriental love ot, 
reasons for, 39 

Slavery, under the Empire, 51-54 ; and 
Christianity, 52 ; and the philoso- 
phers, 53 

Socrates, 43, 173. i74 



274 



A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE 



Sophocles, 43 ; character and statue of, 

173-175 
Spitting, how far a matter of habit, 89 ; 

horror of an Irish friar at, 112 
Suburbs, how they spoil cities, 5, 6 

Tacitus, 47, 50 

Testament, the Old, early Christian use 

of, 170-171 
Theresa, S., 116; Bernini's statue of, 

164 
Tiberius, 47, 50; galleys of, 140, 146, 

149 
Titian, Sacred and Profane Love^ by, 

159-161 
Tivoli, Hadrian's villa at, 44 
Trams, electric, at Rome, qualities of, 

138-140 



Trastevere, 239 

Tufa, Our Lady of the, legend of, 141- 
143 

Ultramontanism, narrow, instance 
of, 37 

Van Eyck, Hubert and Jan, 252 
Vatican, the (see also under Sculpture), 

166 
Velasquez, portrait by, 157- 1 59 
Vespasian, 40, 43 
Vestals, the, 47-50 

Water, holy, English attitude to, 131- 

132 
Wesley, John, chapels of, 17 

Yacco, Sada, Japanese music and, 96 



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